THE CHRISTIAN STATE 
a POLITICAL VISION: OF CHRIST 


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GEO. D-HORRON 


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Mme CORISTIAN STATE 


meee SICAL VISION OF CARIST. 


BOOKS BY PROF. GEORGE D. HERRON, D.D, 


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From Tuer N. Y. Critic. 


“Mr. Herron is a man of power. What is most attrac- 
tive about his book is its moral rather than its intellectual 
seriousness, to adopt Matthew Arnold’s phrase. Mr. Her- 
ron aims at producing impressions, not by iteration as 
Matthew Arnold does, for he has none of the tricks of that 
literary magician, but by earnest and emphatic statements. 
He writes with immense enthusiasm and fine culture. Mr. 
Herron, like a prophet —a speaker of God, that he is— 
does not argue; he appeals to one’s moral nature; he 
pleads, he commands.” 





THE CHRISTIAN STATE 


meee 1ICAL VISION OF CHRIST. 


Pesonoe OF. SIX LECTURES DELIVERED IN 
CHURCHES IN VARIOUS AMER- 
ICAN CITIES. 


By 


GEORGE D. HERRON 


‘For who is so irreligious, as not to be sorrowful? who so proud, as not 
to be humbled ? who so wrathful, as not to forgive? who so luxurious, as not 
to abstain? who so sensual, as not to restrain himself ? who so wicked, as not 
to repent during these days? And rightly so. For the Passion of the Lord 
is here, this very day, shaking the earth, rending the rocks, and opening the 
tombs. . - . Nothing better could be done in the world than that which 
was done by the Lord on these days.’’ — BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX. 


NEW YORK: 46 EAst 14TH STREET. 


PiaoMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 
BOSTON : 100 PuRCHASE STREET. 


CopyRIGHT, 1895, 


By Tuomas Y. CrowELtt & Co. 


TYPE-SETTING AND ELECTROTYPING BY 
C. J. PETERS & SON, BOSTON. 


S. J. PARKHILL & CO., PRINTERS. 





TO . 
he. Hy Father anv Mother, 


‘ON _WHOSE FAITH I BUILD, 


| Ape 
pee Pratt <i 





acy NOD EON« [i . 


Te tHe POLITICAL APPEARING OF CHRIST. ... 
Ou> Tue DMEMEEIN OU ATE a> ace ola je) ek 


III. THE CHRISTIAN STATE THE SOcIAL REALIZA— 


emer FIEMOCRACY “4... 2c go 8 ee 


IV. THE CHRISTIAN STATE THE REDEMPTION OF LAW 


PRRONAUP OR Fo 0 6 cee Ss ak ie a os 


V. THE CHRISTIAN STATE THE SALVATION OF THE 


OR ee PL ae as Leek a ye 


VI. THE CHRISTIAN REVIVAL OF THE NATION . . 


119 





THE POLITICAL APPEARING OF CHRIST. 


ALTHOUGH we must not for one moment deceive ourselves 
into thinking that our greatness or our learning is in the small- 
est degree necessary to Almighty God, we may yet remember 
that he, of his infinite mercy, has willed that man may become 
a co-operator with him in his work. It cannot be denied that 
the world is passing through a crisis which will one day form 
an epoch in history. There is trouble on all sides; the horizon 
of the future is black with clouds; and to whom may we look 
for succor if not to thee, O God? Industry, commerce, science, 
have advanced with rapid strides; but their progress is vain if 
the men who are to redeem society by a noble and upright 
standard of conduct are lacking. 

Petroleum, dynamite, — these are the fruits of the teaching 
of the philosopher and the atheist. By the help of, and in the 
name of, Jesus Christ, I will endeavor to point out to you in 
these sermons the only remedy against the perils which surround 
us, and in his name I will show you the truth. First of all, the 
most essential of all things is the knowledge of our Lord and 
Saviour Jesus Christ. In the knowledge of Jesus Christ is con- 
tained the sum and substance of all truth. That point reached, 
there is an end of all hypothesis. With one clear, distinct rule 
of conduct, there is no longer any occasion to go from sophism 
to sophism, from negation to negation, from system to system. 
. . . Christianity has power to rekindle in our hearts the flame 
of brotherly love, to unite us all in one bond of faith and hope 
and love; and by and by, when the present crisis of trouble 
and difficulty shall have yielded to its holy influence, the strong 
will help the weak, and war and tumult will cease from the face 
of the earth. — Father Agostino da Montefeltro, 


THE CHRISTIAN STATE 


A POLITICAL VISION OF CHRIST. 


————— ee 


i: 


fo TICAL. APPEARING OF 
ea AR ey De 


In beginning this lecture course, I ask you 
who hear me, and whoever may hereafter read 
_these lectures in published form, to bear with 
me ina word of explanation and appeal. The 
six lectures of this course are the outgrowth 
and development of a widely discussed and 
criticised Commencement Oration, spoken to 
the University of Nebraska, on the 13th of 
June, 1894. The most of the criticisms com- 
ing to my notice have been wholly based upon 
either garbled and fragmentary reports or vio- 


lent interpretations of that address. While 
II 


12 THE CHRISTIAN SiAdea 


the idea of being personally understood has no 
part in this larger development of my thought, 
—for these lectures had been in preparation 
some months before their condensation in the 
oration in question, —I yet hope that, for the 
sake of the cause for which I speak, the criti- 
cism which may now be called forth will be less 
hasty, and more attentive to what I really say. 
The fault of the oration was the attempt at 
ceiving form to too much in one address — which 
fault I now try to remove. Although I have 
earnestly sought to sympathetically consider 
even the severest and most unreasoning criti- 
cism, and am glad to omit a familiar quotation 
from Mr. Chauncey M. Depew which he pro- 
nounces unauthoritative, I find myself unable 
to modify the essential message spoken to the 
University. But I have tried to so amplify and 
clarify that message as to leave no ground for 
mistaking my meaning. For my actual mes- 
sage I wish to evade no responsibility, but 
rather to be held strictly accountable. I only 
ask that critics may not base their judgments 
upon detached expressions, or even upon sin- 


THE POLITICAL APPEARING OF CHRIST. 13 


gle lectures, but try to adequately and sympa- 
 thetically consider my thought and purpose as - 
a whole, and thereupon base all judgment and 
criticism. 

Nor can my message be justly considered 
except from the point of view at which I stand, 
and from which I shall speak — which is that 
of a political and social learner of Christ. No 
cause or truth can be helped by passing judg- 
ment upon me for failing to accomplish what 
I have not undertaken, and have no calling or 
purpose to undertake. It can but result in 
misunderstanding and impatience to persist in 
judging me from some other man’s point of 
view, —from the standpoint of the statistical 
analyist of social conditions, or that of the 
scientific economist, or that of the religious 
or political partisan, This lecture course will 
not be an attempt to contribute to political, 
social, or theological science. It will be an 
appeal to the moral reason and undeveloped 
religious faith of the people; an effort to show 
the political appearing of Christ I have seen, 
while looking for some way of faith by which 


I4 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


our nation might pass from the present social 
distress and perplexity, through gathering storm 
and coming change, into a more orderly and 
righteous development. The hope of a na- 
tional revival of the religion of Christ moves 
me to bear witness to his wisdom and author- 
ity in the apprehension and fulfilment of the 
functions of the state. Where there is no 
faith in Christ as immanent in the life of the 
world and guiding in the social movement, no 
faith in him as the living and reigning ruler 
of the nations, my words will be foolishness 
or an offence. There will also be sincere 
Christian minds, devoted and aspiring Chris- 
tian hearts, who will not believe my report 
because unaccustomed to think of Christ in 
the terms which I shall use, or to conceive of 
him in the relations in which I shall set him 
forth. Although my words may have no more 
than an inspirational value, while I shall often 
speak with sorrow and reluctance, only after 
long waiting and under the profound sense of 
a divine compulsion, it is yet with great joy 
and large hope that I thus confess my political 


THE POLITICAL APPEARING OF CHRIST. 15 


faith in Christ, believing that I appeal to a 
like faith in many who are looking for the 
redemption of our nation and a juster civili- 
zation. 

A political order that shall associate men in 
justice is the present search of civilized peo- 
ples. The old ways of political thinking and 
doing have exhausted themselves. Our present 
systems of human relations are not able to 
endure the strain that is coming upon them. 
Political constitutions, now sacred, will be con- 
sumed in the fervent heat of the social trial, 
and present forms of institutions will disappear. 
While the peoples international are waiting 
with a marvellous social patience, with no deep 
or authoritative disposition to any revolution 
that is not moral, constitutional, and progres- 
sive, none expect the existing order to continue. 
Not since Augustus achieved the Roman unity 
of a world of splendid misery, has the race so 
felt the certainty and the dread, the sorrow and 
the hope, of universal change. The civiliza- 
tion of to-day is the camp of a vast unorgan- 


ized and undisciplined army, without visible 


16 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


leadership or apparent method, yet consciously 
preparing for some nearing conflict which shall 
issue in a new beginning of history. 

That civilization is full of trouble and change 
is not a cause for mere fear and dread, but for 
faith, sacrifice, and work. Nothing could be 
more dreadful than to have the present order 
of things exist without discontent, complaint, 
and change. The social movement bears only 
a superficial likeness to any movement of the 
past, and our possible failure ‘to apprehend its 
meaning and act with its forces is the only 
ground it offers for fear. The world-passion 
of to-day is construction, however destructive 
some of its manifestations may yet prove. 
Unorganized and unharmonious as the forces 
of social change now seem, the peoples will be 
restrained by their faith in the providence and 
deliverance of the change, and united in the 
living sacrifice of their noblest sons upon the 
altar of their faith. The peoples are not angry, 
but rather in sorrow and expectancy, because of 
their inmost conviction that out of their travail 


and anguish will a better order of society be 


7HE POLITICAL APPEARING OF CHRIST. 17 


born. The world is full of discontent; but it 
is the discontent of God with the degradation 
of his sons and daughters under the tyranny of 
a material dominion. Society is moving quickly 
toward revolution; but it is revolution from 
anarchy to order, from industrial slavery to 
industrial freedom, from social violence to 
social peace, from political atheism to the 
kingdom of God. The revolution is the mani- 
festation of the social self-discovery which man 
is now making, and comes as the social creation 
“of the world. 

Since man first awoke to the consciousness 
of his being, social progress has been chiefly 
the development of the self-knowledge and in- 
dependent powers of the individual. The free- 
dom and equipment of the individual for a fair 
rivalry with his fellows has been the funda- 
mental thought of modern political philosophy 
and activity. But we are now seeing that there 
can be no true individual development except 
through association ; no individual freedom ex- 
cept through social unity. Through experience 
and suffering, with a knowledge too deep for 


18 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


logic and too high for the understanding of a 
materialistic philosophy of society, the race is 
learning that it is not an aggregation of indi-- 
viduals, but one body, one humanity, of which 
all individuals are members ; that it is not nat- 
ural, but the misapprehension and antagonism 
of nature, that these members should. strive 
with each other for place and life in the body. 
We are in the beginnings of an evolution of 
human life that as truly transcends the self- 
consciousness of the individual, as the evolved 
and reasoning man transcends the animal king- 
dom. Men are no longer simply conscious that 
they can act as righteous or unrighteous indi- 
viduals. The self-consciousness of society is 
the evolution now in process. There is slowly 
waking in men what might be called the con- 
Sciousness of each other —the consciousness of 
a power to act together as one man, in the de- 
velopment of one common human life and des- 
tiny, to which all are to contribute, and of which 
all are to partake. The consciousness of one’s 
own mind and powers is being transcended by 


the race consciousness of one universal mind 


THE POLITICAL APPEARING OF CHRIST. 19 


and spirit sovereign within all men, making 
them members one of another, and humanity 
a body of God. The education of the dawning 
social mind in the wisdom of the immanent 
social spirit is the work of the new age of crea- 
tion at hand. 

Society must henceforth be the end of polit- 
ical science and effort. Men are ceasing to 
believe, and can no longer be persuaded, that a 
condition of rivalry, in which they are supposed 
to act from an enlightened self-interest, is the 
real ground of social order and progress. The 
civilization that now builds upon-the assump- 
tion that men are antagonists, and not members 
of one social body, is fundamentally anarchical 
—against the divine course of things. The 
politics that remains insensible to the waking 
social consciousness, the politicians who ignore 
the social conscience and make the holy watch- 
_words of the past the hypocrisy and traffic of 
the present, will be but fuel for burning in the 
day of wrath that is coming to consume our 
trade politics and false social philosophies as 
stubble. Not individual liberty to compete, 


20 THE CHRISTIAN STATE: 


and the equilibrium of warring self-interests, 
but the association of men in a communion of 
justice, is the work of the politics that would 
command the patience and win the respect of 
the people. The vision of brotherhood will not 
pass away, for it is heavenly. Politics must 
obey that vision, or the people will try obedi- 
ence without politics, and a world-tragedy will 
have to be the school in which the nations shall 
learn their law and mission. 

But revolution, in the historic sense of the 
word, cannot save civilization, even though 
revolution lie between us and our social sal- 
vation. We need some power sufficient to 
deliver us from the necessity, to save us the 
sorrow and waste of revolution. Notwithstand- 
ing Carlyle, revolutions go backward as well as 
forward. Though we sometimes foolishly im- 
agine ourselves separated from the past by 
great fixed gulfs, the continuity of our one 
human development cannot be broken. We 
can only break with the past by getting our- 
selves out of the universe. The past is, and is 


to be; and the work of the present is to carry 


femeeorrtICAL APPEARING OF CHRIST. 21 


the past, enlarged and sanctified, into the 
future. There has never been a great revo- 
lution, seeming to break with the past and 
make the earth new for an instant, from which 
there has not been a terrible recoil. Sooner or 
later the revolutionized nation, or civilization, 
has had to return upon its course and connect 
itself with the good substance of the evil forms 
from which it revolted. The continuity has 
had to be taken up again, the broken links 
reunited. The religious revolution we call 
the Reformation was a universal loss as well 
as a gain. And we are already beginning to 
see that the future power and purity of the 
church are involved in our recovering much 
that Protestantism threw away; in reuniting 
our broken fragments, our discordant sects 
of Christendom, in a true and holy universal 
church. We begin to see that the Reforma- 
tion was a temporary, however needful, phase 
of the development of Christian history ; that 
the Catholic Church of the fifteenth century 
was spiritually splendid and historic, with in- 


stitutions which Protestantism needs; with 


22 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


a wealth of sacrifice and spiritual glory which 
should be the inheritance of us all. The 
French Revolution is not ended yet; and 
France finds no rest, because the break of the 
nation with the past was so violent that the 
continuity of the national life has been lost for 
a time. Because France has tried to have no 
past, the nation. has as yet no certain future. 
I doubt not we shall one day see that problems 
of national life we thought settled with the 
American Revolution and the formation of our 
constitution, will yet have to be reconsidered. 
Revolutions that come through enforced sepa- 
ration and war, notwithstanding their historical 
gains, always carry with them elements that 
react and curse, degrade and corrupt. The 
nation, the cause, that triumphs by the sword, 
takes death into its moral life quite as much 
as perished armies have taken death into the 
bodies of their soldiers. 

Into the national mind there comes an oc- 
casional new and sobering thought of the cost 
of our Civil War, — the million slain; living 


thousands with injured bodies and souls and 


ferret /CAL APPEARING OF CHRIST. 23 


lost opportunities; generations of sectional 
strife and race bitterness; a race turned into a 
freedom almost worse than slavery because of 
the shameful irresponsibility of the nation en- 
slaving it; speculation and greed laying founda- 
tions for monstrous politieal corruptions and 
industrial despotisms ; the patriotism, heroisms, 
and triumphs of the living and dead citizen- 
soldiers made the unholy traffic of political 
hypocrites, and sacred national memories tra- 
ditionalized and desecrated to serve blind 
leaders of blind political parties; a century 
required to even measurably recover from the 
moral shock and ruin of the war. There wasa 
better way to have preserved the Union, freed 
the slave, and purified the nation, if we had 
only known the day of our visitation in time. 
But we would not. So God walked in the 
path our nation made for his feet, because we 
would not walk in the path he made for ours. 
War is not God's best way of progress for 
man — God’s chosen channel for the increase of 
divine life in the nations —though the blind- 


ness and obstinacy of man make channels of 


24. THE CHRISTIAN Si ee 


blood for the river of life to flow in and mingle. 
God has shown us a better way than revolution 
by force, — the eternal way of sacrifice, by 
which all progress sooner or later has to climb. 
The cross of his Son has revealed a mightier 
power than the power of arms, a more trium- 
phant force than force, — the power and force 
and triumph of love, which never faileth to tri- 
umph, though it sacrifice all and suffer long. 
The divine development of both the personal 
life and the race life, the way in which civiliza- 
tions are evolved from exhausted forms and 
customs, is through a new sacrifice and inflow 
of life. Not revolution, but divine evolution 
from the past, is the method of a better future, 
if we will follow the way of sacrifice and permit 
God to move his purposes therein. Revolution 
and separation mean ultimate anarchy and 
despotism, a last state worse than the first, 
unless the past is sacredly kept and speedily 
wrought into the future. The ruined man, the 
dying system, the decaying order of things, 
always has within the germ of the living and 


the new. <A new spirit evolves life out of 


A 


THE POLITICAL APPEARING OF CHRIST. 25 


death; a new purpose changes the way of 
wickedness into the highway of holiness; a 
new element turns darkness into light. It 
was a new disclosure of love upon the cross, a 
new revelation and spirit of life in the Son of 
man, a new manifestation of sacrifice as unl- 
versal law, that evolved a living Christendom 
from an exhausted Roman world. Progress is 
a divine journey, a sacred pilgrimage, along a 
holy way of sacrifice, that is leading man into 
the freedom of God. When the nations have 
learned through suffering to walk in this way, 
then God’s judgment days will be man’s festi- 
vals of joy, as God would have them, not times 
of shame and dread and burning. 

It is but just that we sacrifice ourselves in 
procuring justice for our fellow-dwellers in the 
present, and for the citizens of a holier future 
we shall not live to see. We may be misunder- 
stood by our brothers, and they may refuse to 
move in the way and with the faith we know 
they ought to move. They may slay us, and 
trample upon the life we offer in their behalf. 
We may have to bear the consequences of their 


26 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


sins, and be the bearers of their guilt. But we 
ought so to suffer for our brothers, and that 
with joy, while we entreat them to ascend the 
path that leads to justice and to peace. We 
are bound to expiate what is evil in the past, 
and preserve and carry on to our brothers what 
is good. We ourselves are the products of the 
past, and the sacrifice of the past is our strength 
and power now. None of us in the present are 
righteous, and the future will have to expiate 
our sins and correct our mistakes. It is un- 
reasonable and unjust that we should seek to 
separate ourselves from the body of humanity 
of which we are members; from the divine 
course and cost of its progress. We can be 
neither true to the past nor just to the future, 
neither true nor just to our brothers of the 
present, save through the sacrifice of our pres- 
ent life in bearing away the sins of the past for 
the deliverance of the future. We cannot abide 
in the past —that is death. Nor can we break 
with the past—that is ultimate suicide. But 
our faith may, and it must, make future out of 


the past, through making the present a holy 


Pee POLITICAL ‘APPEARING OF CHRIST. 27 


gift and sacrifice to progress— which is the 
coming of the kingdom of God. 

The testimony of history —to which the so- 
cial movement is listening as has no other world 
movement — witnesses throughout to sacrifice 
as the power by which progress has been made. 
Underneath and within the revolutions and his- 
toric adjustments that have appeared to con- 
quer, the structures of civilization are founded 
and upheld by those who have been faith- 
ful witnesses for the right against the wrong, 
while lifting no hand for the violent overthrow 
of the organizations of wrong. The almighty 
forces that are really working out our human 
destiny are largely unseen in their operation; 
but their work is clearly manifest in any pure 
view of the historic retrospect. Not the men 
who have brought down other lives with the 
sword, but the men who have laid down their 
own lives through an unresisting faith in the 
triumph of right through moral processes, have 
prepared the way for the advance of man. 
The world lives upon the lives of love that 


are given for its redemption and perfection. 


28 THE CHRISTIAN STAGe 


Christianity more vitally and speedily con- 
quered the world, and that against Roman 
organizations and legions, in the century of its 
sacrifice, than in all the succeeding centuries 
of ecclesiastical alliances with the forces of war 
and diplomacy. The failure of the faith of 
Christian institutions in the law and conquer- 
ing power of sacrifice has been the calamity 
and sorrow of modern history ; the secret of all 
our social woe and perplexity. The revival of 
this compromised and decadent faith, the gath- 
ering of the forces of sacrifice upon the field 
of the social conflict, is the present hope and 
deliverance of the world. 

Now, the most significant fact of this present 
social juncture and crisis of human affairs, 
when all recognize the inevitability and on- 
going processes of revolution of some quality, 
and under some leadership, is the political 
faith in Jesus Christ that is rising from the 
waking social consciousness and _ increasing 
social purpose of the world. The social and 
consequent political revival of Christianity is 


the most significant fact of modern life, and 


THE POLITICAL APPEARING OF CHRIST. 29 


promises a divine and altogether new. quality of 
revolution — revolution by the force of revela- 
tion — revolution come down to earth out of 
heaven. Not merely or mainly in institutions 
of religion does this awakened and practical 
faith in the righteousness of Christ appear, but 
in movements and forces that religious institu- 
tions largely ignore or hold in disrepute. In- 
stinctively, the movements for association and 
social justice are turning to the person of Jesus 
as the social ideal that can alone satisfy the 
social aspiration which is the prayer of civili- 
zation. The multitudes believe, though they 
cannot define their belief, that the real Jesus is 
the one human life perfectly socialized and able 
to fulfil man’s social nature. With a pathetic 
and almost inarticulate expectancy, they are 
waiting to be guided into the eternal order of 
life that Jesus revealed as the natural right and 
destiny of man upon the earth. Notwithstanding 
the false habits of religious feeling and doctrine 
associated with the teachings of Christ, there 
is everywhere a deepening and intensifying 
conviction that his mind is the mind that the 


30 THE CHRISTIAN STATE, 


institutions of the world must receive in order 
to procure social justice. Christ is to-day the 
actual leader of the yet unorganized but rapidly 
developing political thought and effort of West- 
ern nations. 

This political faith in Christ is the logical 
issue of the social movement. The whole 
social revolution, whatever has been or may be 
its accidents or incidents, is a steady divine 
movement toward order. The immediate in- 
tensity and strain of the revolution he in the 
search and social determination for a deliver- 
ance from the present intolerable anarchy of 
human conditions. The revolution carries with 
it an increasing insistence upon the moral 
sacredness and just realization of law. The 
true worth and significance of law, which Jesus 
taught to be the education and growth of 
human life in justice, are being apprehended 
by the social revolution as by no other world 
movement. The political appearing and leader- 
ship of Christ is both the vital force of the 
social revolution, and the revelation of the law 
of its development. It is the profounder and 


THE POLITICAL APPEARING OF CHRIST. 31 


more universal realization of sacrifice, as the 
law of progress and order, association and 
freedom. 

The political appearing of Christ is manifest 
in the increasing social functions of the state, 
and the socialization of law. There is a grow- 
ing belief on the part of social reformers of all 
classes, that a juster order of society can be 
procured only through the state as the social 
organ; the state is the only organ through 
which the people can act collectively in the 
search for justice; hence all social reform is 
coming to effect itself through political action. 
With this turning to the state as the social 
organ, has risen an increasing faith in Christ 
as the social lawgiver; an increasing appre- 
hension of his law of sacrifice as the funda- 
mental law of society. It is thus that the 
various social reformations, without regard to 
the religious creeds of the reformers, are con- 
verging in an almost unconscious movement 
to translate the Christianity of Christ into 
political doctrines and institutions. Such ne- 


cessity has been laid upon the social reforms 


32 THE CHRISTIAN SdATe 


that they are being divinely compelled to ac- 
cept the truth of Christ’s law of love, by what- 
ever name they may choose to call it, in order 
to escape their own failure and the social 
despair of the people. 

The political appearing of Christ is thus 
more than a vision, and no dream, but the ac- 
complished fact with which nations and institu- 
tions must begin to reckon, and the distinction 
and glory of our age. What makes this the 
most promising as well as critical hour of his- 
tory, is the fact that all standards of right and 
wrong are coming to measure themselves by 
the one standard of Christ’s teachings. Popu- 
. lar have far outrun institutional conceptions 
of justice, and men will no longer be content 
with any other kind of right than Christ’s. 
The great undercurrents of popular feeling are 
moving toward Christ, and the deep under- 
tones of social wrong are beginning to articu- 
late political confessions of faith in his power 
to deliver. Crude and impure as is the faith 
of the multitudes who are turning to Jesus for 
social right and political truth, it is yet a faith 


pare OL SIICAL APPEARING OF CHRIST. 33 


divinely inspired and full of hope for our nation 
and the world. Not understanding and hardly 
knowing the name of him it follows, the world 
is gone after Christ, and the Pharisees of offi- 
cial religion prevail nothing in keeping the 
people to the beaten paths. That religious 
officialism discerns not that it is the Christ of 
God the peoples are following is not strange, 
but the perfect continuity of all the divine 
ways of the past; neither in religion nor in 
politics do the official classes see the measure 
and meaning of the great movements that pass 
before their eyes. The social movement has 
never been other than the coming of Christ 
to rule the nations in righteousness, and the 
social effort of our day is becoming a political 
manifestation of Christ. 

The historic coming and work of Christ were 
the eternal manifestation and enactment of 
sacrifice as the fundamental social law. The 
sacrifice of God had always been the life of 
men, and history a manifestation of his Spirit. 
The world was constituted in the law of sacri- 
fice —the slain Lamb — before its foundation. 


34 THE CHRISTIAN SiAgza 


But not until this sacrifice of God in a com- 
pletely humanized man, could we apprehend. 
our social law and destiny so that God could 
perfectly socialize our human life. According 
to Christ's philosophy of life and association, 
the harmony and development of the individual 
life lie solely in the absorption of its interest 
and effort, in the fulfilment of a common and 
universal life, in which all are to share and 
become perfect. The mind of Christ is the 
mind that would make each life a sacrifice to 
the life of others, a contribution to the life of 
all. The righteousness of Christ was his per- 
fect sacrifice for the world, and that sacrifice 
is the complete and eternal definition of right- 
eousness. Sacrifice is the social law of gravity, 
in all the heavens, in the organization of life 
upon the earth. By no other law could there 
be a universe, and no other law has power to 
procure social unity among men. The mind 
of Christ is the one mind that has perfectly 
understood and obeyed this fundamental and 
universal law of association. His sacrifice 


manifests the character of all power and au- 


THE POLITICAL APPEARING OF CHRIST. - 35 


thority, all government and order. It is the 
perfect utterance of the moral mind of God, 
and the disclosure of the whole moral nature 
of the universe. Infinite as is the unknown, 
man cannot conceive of anything in the un- 
known as different in nature and quality from 
the right manifested by Christ in sacrifice. 
Society is nothing else than the organized sac- 
rifice of the people. 

The associating and organizing power of the 
law of sacrifice was revealed through the recep- 
tion of the Spirit by the first Christian commu- 
nity. After their Lord had been taken from 
them, and they were of one accord in the pur- 
pose to do whatever his Holy Spirit might 
reveal, there came upon a little company of 


those who believed in Christ, — one hundred 





and twenty men and women, —a profound im- 
mersion in his Holy Spirit; so that their 
unholy spirit, with its unsocial, selfish, and in- 
dividualistic desires, was driven out of them, 
and no man called anything his own, but of- 
fered himself and his all upon the altar of an 


entire devotion to human need. This was the 


36 THE CHRISTIAN STATE: 


beginning of the ultimate civilization — the 
society that is becoming. So perfect was the | 
social order of this little community, that its 
members defined their civilization, and the 
civilization which they hoped to get into the 
world, as the communion of the Holy Ghost. 
They meant by this that their minds and dis- 
positions were perfectly agreed and accordant 
in the mind of God. They became of one 
mind, one spirit, truly associated, through re- 
ceiving the Holy Spirit they had seen in 
Christ as the uniting, organizing spirit~ of 
them all. They were thus perfectly socialized 
— divinely communized. In that transcendent 
moment of human history the social order of 
heaven appeared upon the earth. 

Through the centuries that have passed 
since then, — and they have quickly passed, — 
the Spirit of the Son of God has been chan- 
cing human hfe and society into his likeness, 
The history of these centuries has been the 
political coming of Christ. Through the quick- 
ening and teaching of his Spirit, the world 
has been learning the wisdom that can make 


gee OL17/CAT, APPEARING OF CHRIST. 37 


its civilizations just, and the truth that can 
make its peoples free ; learning, in blind, stum- 
‘bling ways, through experience and suffering, 
through failure and tragedy, and yet learning 
withal. The nations that have grown up 
through the Christian centuries are in a rela- 
tion to Christ almost analogous to that which 
the members of the first community of disci 
ples sustained to their Lord before their unity 
was fulfilled in his Spirit. The organizing 
Spirit of that community has been coming 
upon the community of the nations — slowly 
to our thought, and without observation. We 
are nearing, there is upon us, a dispensation 
of the Spirit, as much more comprehensive 
and powerful than the religious institutions of 
our day foresee, as the dispensation that im- 
mersed the early disciples was mightier and 
more comprehensive than what they sought. 
And such consummation is not a magical or 
extra-rational event, but the natural evolution 
of the socializing forces that have been at work 
since the first coming of the Son of man. 


It may be that not until now could the social 


38 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


ideal and law of Christ have a political inter- 
pretation and application. It may be that the — 
Spirit in Jesus was greater than his idea, | 
truer than his historical perspective. It is 
possible that he saw the consummation of the 
ages nearer than it was really to be; that what 
we shall be is not appearing as soon as he 
thought. Of the day of the full consumma- 
tion, of the hour of the perfect organization of 
human life in the economy of redemption, the 
Son of man said he did not know; the time 
was known only to his Father. Even so, his 
sacrifice is increasingly apprehended and obeyed 
as the law of life, and his Spirit is the creative 
and directive power of the social movement. 
Without knowing by whom they are conquered, 
institutions are reluctantly yielding to the ad- 
vancing Christ. 

The Spirit of Christ may even again be 
crucified before our eyes by social revenge 
and hate. It may be we shall once more see 
Herod and Pilate and Caiaphas allied to over- 
come the Spirit that is destructive to their 
authority and dominion. But every such cru- 


THE POLITICAL APPEARING OF CHRIST. 39 


cifixion is a festival of new life for the world. 
That which is crucified becomes the resurrec- 
tion life of man, and in the power of the in- 
creased life he ascends higher toward the goal 
of his social perfection. Though we may still 
have unsuspected saving lessons to learn, 
through baffled effort, through fearful disaster 
and visionless waiting, yet the Spirit of truth 
and judgment is leading to the perfect social 
day, and bids us abound in the hope of the 
social destiny which we have seen in Christ. 
The rude world, of which we are a part, is not 
old and hard, as the poets and prophets tell 
us, but very young, a mere child-world yet ; so 
young that the race is hardly more than begin- 
ning its real career, with but fitful glimpses 
and uninterpreted dreams of the power and 
beauty that await its full spiritual development. 
And this development is nothing else than the 
social perfection of man through the grace that 
is being brought to us by the larger revelations 
of Christ in the movements that are making 


our day instinct and glorious with the. hope 
of God. 


40 THE CHRISTIAN STATE 


The discovery of Christ is the reality of our 
times. The people have found the Christ, — 


the great peoples collectively as well as men 





individually, —and are proclaiming their dis- 
covery to our economies and institutions. We 
have found him in the waking social conscious- 
ness; in the developing political thought; in 
the organizations and efforts to reform society ; 
in the moral earnestness and social question- 
ing that make both painful and glorious the 
upturned faces of great congregations, eager 
for original inspiration and vital truth; in 
the social trouble of both rich and poor, each 
seeking to know if there really be a kingdom 
of God and a way to realize it upon the earth ; 
in the spiritual life with which our whole na- 
tion is quivering, preparing for a great reap- 
ing time soon; in his political appearing as 
Redeemer and Judge of our customs and or- 
ganizations. Wherever we turn, whether to 
question or to help, we find the Christ in the 
need or the faith of men; in the social hope 
of the organizing social activities of the day. 

The Christian who is mainly a religionist 


fff POLITICAL APPEARING OF CHRIST. AI 


has been indefinitely or indifferently telling us 
of a time when Christ will come to judge the 
world. But in the hour when we have thought 
not the Son of man has come, and now sits in 
actual judgment upon the world, with its civil- 
izations waiting at his judgment seat. ‘The 
Lord whom the leaders of official religion have 
sought in their worship and observances, and 
whom the political rulers have denied, has 
come to his temple in the movement for social 
justice. Upon foundations which cannot be 
moved, his judgment seat has been estab- 
lished by the social aspiration and faith, and 
his judgments will increase without end. Our 
eschatology need no longer be concerned with 
probations in the future, for the judgment day 
is come. Wecan no longer remove the judg- 
ment -to some remote time, for the judgment 
is in process. It has already come to pass that 
civilization accepts Christ as its Judge, and 
that men and movements are submitting them- 
selves to his judgments, without knowing from 
whence and by whom they are judged. Now 
is the crisis of this world, and the dominion 


42 THE CHRISTIAN STATE, 


of self is being broken and his sovereignty 
cast from our midst before our unseeing 
eyes. Christ is here, to bé) DOtiIG@raeeied 
and crowned, in our nation and age, in this 
room and hour; and all the voices®oimwant 
and woe, of discontent and social anger, of 
strike and war, join with the voices of sor- 
row and judgment, of faith and love, in warn- 
ing us that we should get ready for the social 
baptism of the Holy Ghost and fire. Instead 
of dreaming of some dim and distant mil- 
lennium, we had best find our divine place 
and work in the millennium that has begun, 
and lift up our eyes to behold the King who 
is here in his abiding kingdom and eternal 
kingship. This solemn and historic hour of 
our national destiny has its awful significance, 
as well as immovable ground of hope, in the 
fact that Christ is actually ruling and judging 
our nation, inspiring and leading the reviving 
political faith of the people, while the political 
Sadducees are blindly and foolishly repeating 
that we have no king but the majority. 





IT. 


bad 3) ce 
THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 
Ee Ah 
be 7 
eh iy atts a 
te iy oY, - fl “ oe a te) ne 
Se ae eer a a 


THE evil at the present day is not that men assign too 
much value to life, but the reverse. Life has fallen in estima- 
tion, because, as at all periods of crisis and disorganization, the 
chain is broken which in all forms of belief attaches it through 
humanity to heaven. It has fallen, because the consciousness 
of mutual human responsibility, which alone constitutes its 
dignity and strength, being lost together with all community of 
belief, its sphere of activity has become restricted, and it has 
been compelled to fall back upon material interests, minor pas- 
sions, and petty aims. It has fallen, because it has been too 
much individualized; and the remedy lies in re-attaching life to 
heaven, in raising it again, in restoring to it the consciousness 
of its power and sanctity. The means consist in re-tempering 
the individual life through communion with the universal life; 
they consist in restoring to the individual that which I have 
from the outset called the feeling of the collective, in pointing 
out to him his place in the tradition of the species, in bringing 
him into communion, by love and by works, with all his fellow- 
men. By isolating ourselves, we have begun to feel ourselves 
feeble and little; we have begun to despise our own efforts and 
those of our brethren towards the attainment of the ideal; and 
we have in despair set ourselves to repeat and comment upon 
the ‘* Carpe diem’? of the heathen poet. We must make our- 
selves great and strong again by association; we must not dis- 
credit life, but make it holy. By persisting to search out the 
secret, the law of individuality in the individuality itself, man 
ends only in egotism, if he is evil-minded —in scepticism, in 
fatalism, or in contemplation, if he is virtuous. — Joseph 
Mazzini. 


en 


II. 
trie RISTIAN STATE. 


I NEED but to appeal to your intelligent con- 
sideration of history, to your consciousness of 
the world within you, and your observation of 
the world without, to have you confess with me 
that the world is far less institutionally gov- 
erned than we commonly assume. It is a su- 
perficial and puerile explanation of the world 
that accredits human order to visible religious 


and political institutions, which at best are but 


rude indications of an order that is unseen and. 


almighty. It is not the laws upon statute 
books that procure the most of the right and 
justice that are in the world, nor the power of 
churches that moves the bravest and holiest 
lives to lay themselves down for the world. 
Nation is not withheld from nation through 
fear of standing armies, and we do not go to 
45 


46 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


our rest at night through faith in the police. 
The forces that execute the penalties of broken 
laws are applied to but a small fraction of the 
earth’s population, and are often the cause of 
more lawlessness than lawfulness. Socially or- 
ganic and permanent as institutions are, it is 
not their forces and customs that restrain the 
wrong passions of men, and constrain them to 
think and act for the good of their fellows. 
The thousand conflicting interests have not 
even their semblance of adjustment through 


the powers that are seen. While the great 


world movements for righteousness have al- 


ways been born within institutions, their con- 
sciousness has always been of an order of 
progress transcending and overcoming the 
institutions within which they were born. 
Any scientific interpretation of history, any 
faithful analysis of progress, can end only in 
witnessing to the supreme fact of the unseen 
government of the world. An honest account 
of human order, of the evolution of society, of 
the world movement and change in which we 


of the present are caught, compels us to ac- 


THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 47 


knowledge that man is invisibly governed by 
laws he has not yet apprehended, though they 
have apprehended him. The real government 
of the world, in the midst of which we live and 
move and have our progress, is a government 
not made by man, nor yet comprehended by his 
thought, though his movements are the inspira- 
tion of its wisdom, and the compulsion of its 
powers. Yet though this divine government 
of the world be unseen, it has been the only 
actual dominion over man; and there is no 
escape from conscious or unconscious account- 
ability to its judgments. History bears wit- 
ness to the fact that all along its path unseen 
forces have been at work, judging and deliver- 
ing men from their divisions and tyrannies, 
evolving in them a common consciousness of 
unity, and directing them toward one common 
destiny. 

Institutions are ordained to be the organs of 
the communion of the people with the divine 
government that is above and within them. 
The end of institutions is to progressively ap- 


prehend and interpret the laws of this govern- 


48 THE CHRISTIAN STATE 


ment, and increasingly apply its forces to the 
more perfect organization of human life. As 
progress ascends, life will tend to form itself in 
more and more perfect and universal organiza- 
tions, through obedience to the invisible gov- 
ernment of which institutions are sent to be 
the visible manifestation. It is the failure to 
apprehend and obey the divine order, to discern 
and move with the movement of history toward 
unity, that has corrupted institutions, bringing 
them into conflict with progress, causing them 
to be absorbed in the increase of their own 
dominion, instead of the increase of life among 
men; causing them to mistake means for the 
end, scaffoldings for the temple, instead of de- 
voting themselves to the building of the divine 
temple of a perfected humanity. 

The want of a common centre of unity to 
associate the energies and institutions of men 
in a collective and harmonious progress toward 
a common fulfilment of life, has been the fun- 
damental ailment of the world; the cause of 
its divisions and murders, its lusts and wars, 


its anarchies and tyrannies. No one has ex- 


Ae CHRISTIAN STATE. AQ 


pressed this want with such understanding 
and moral emphasis as Joseph Mazzini, the 
purest and wisest of modern political teachers. 
Yet Mazzini, the apostle of association to the 
present world as truly as Paul was the apostle 
of redemption to both his own world and ours, 
failed in that he found no centre of unity, as 
Paul found a living centre for the economy of 
redemption. And there can be no unity with- 
out some living centre that can comprehen- 
sively organize the faiths and activities of men, 
their sciences and policies, under one law of 
intelligence and action, and move them in one 
common development of life. 

There have been arbitrary centres of unity, 
serving their purpose in the progress of the 
world, but becoming centres of confusion 
and disintegration at the moment when unity 
seemed to be accomplished. All the arbitrary 
centres of unity, political and religious, have 
their prophetic symbol in the Tower of Babel. 
However they have begun, they have ended in 
becoming centres in which men have tried to 
subdue God unto themselves, and gain power 


50 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


without righteousness, rather than submit 
themselves to the righteousness of God. The 
failures of history, the catastrophes of great 
powers, the stubbornness and rebellion of man, 
have their secret in this search for unity, exter- 
nal to the spiritual being of social conscious- 
ness of humanity. Men have sought a unity of 
phenomena rather than of life; a unity of ex- 
pediency rather than of faith ; a unity of rights 
rather than of righteousness; a unity of agree- 
ment rather than of truth; a unity in some 
other government of the world than the king- 
dom of association — which is the organization 
of love, giving justice, and making free. From 
the Tower of Babel down to the creeds of 
modern Christendom and the institutions of 
modern democracies, the promises and appear- 
ances of unity, external to the spiritual centre 
of human life, have been leading men to suc- 
cessive confusions and disasters. It is possible 
for our vast modern civilization, deceiving us 
with its splendor and degrading us with its 
power, to become the greatest of the Babels, 
—the sphere of universal confusion. It has 


meee CLIRVSISIAN STATE. 51 


proved a strong delusion to lead us to put faith 
in the lie, that material forces can organize the 
unity of the world in a social order of en- 
lightened self-interest. The race has not yet 
learned to learn obedience save by the things 
which it suffers. 

Out of the long effort to achieve a unity 
other than spiritual and social, a unity of 
equally balanced interests rather than a unity 
of life, have been born the expediencies that 
promised unity only to give anarchy. All ex- 
pediencies between right and wrong are the 
very profundity and subtlety of falsehood, and 
are grounded upon unfaith in right, and faith 
in power. They have in them that thought of 
God as a God of the dead rather than the liv- 
ing, and the hope of cheating the truth and 
defeating retribution. Man after man fails, 
institution after institution rises and exhausts 
itself, reform after reform pours its tides of 
divine passion over the world, and leaves 
desolation as well as purification in its ebb, 
because men believe and practise the disso- 
ciating doctrine that unity is to be found in 


52 THE CHRISTIAN Si Ale 


the adjustment of antagonisms rather than in 
the association of men in right. In an un- 
translated political writing, which seems to | 
have been the channel of Mazzini's deepest 
inspiration, Dante has said: ‘‘ Humanity is 
one. God has created no useless thing. Hu- 
manity exists; hence there must be a single 
aim for all men, a work to be achieved by all. 
The human race must, therefore; wore 
unity, so that all the intellectual forces diffused 
among men may obtain the highest possible 
development in the sphere of thought and 
action.” The search for unity upon the 
ground that men are antagonists rather than 
brothers, that self-interest is the highest per- 
sonal or national motive, can achieve only ex- 
pediencies and disappointments, and end in the 
confession that justice and peace are demons 
of delusion and torment, and that evil is law 
and lord of the world. : 
Yet there must be for man a centre and 
bond of universal unity. If we be rational 
beings, if this be a sane universe, if hfe and 
history have any meaning, there must be some 


THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 53 


common vision of a common destiny that has 
power to converge the innumerable and diver- 
gent efforts, the cross purposes and conflicting 
motives, the institutions and schools of religion 
and politics, and move them in one universal 
harmony of progress. Nothing less than such 
a vision, commanding a common obedience, can 
associate men in a collective pursuit of right- 
eousness, and organize them in a conscious 
movement toward the fulfilment of the unity 
of life. That the race will never rest short of 
such a unity as its goal is the one sure word 
of the past to the present. Above the conflict 
and discord, within the confusion and the dark, 
the God of order and light has been marshalling 
and harmonizing the forces of our one human 
life for their supreme travail and triumph in 
the accomplishment of the divine and abiding 
community of the world. 

It is the mission of the state to discover 
this centre and accomplish this unity of man. 
The state is the only organ through which 
the people can act as one man in the pursuit 
of righteousness ; the only organ through which 


54 THE CHRISTIAN STAGE 


the people can act together in the organization 
and perfection of their common life in justice. 
~The state can have no other meaning than the 
interpretation and execution of the mind of 
God toward the people. It must be the or- 
ganized faith of the people; the manifestation 
of the highest right of which the people have 
knowledge in common; the organ of their com- 
mon consciousness of God. It is ordained to 
be the visible institution of the unseen govern- 
ment of the world; the medium through which 
the law and order of God are received and 
wrought out in progress. If there is a purpose 
in history, the state must be the organ for the 
accomplishing of that purpose; the organ of 
the national inspiration and collective effort 
of the people toward social perfection. It lies 
in the nature of man and in the nature of asso- 
ciation, that the state shall be the organ through 
which the inspiration to associate shall be re- 
ceived and by which it shall be effected. The 
socializing spirit can realize itself only through 
the sacrament of political action. There can 


be no continuous development of a nation’s life 


THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 55 


except its institutions progressively express the 
faith and organize the social reason of the 
people. 

The mission of the state is not fulfilled, ; 
but rather begun, in the liberty of the indi- 
vidual. Liberty is but a-means to the divine 
social end. If liberty is not fulfilled in unity, 
then liberty was the consummation of the 
supreme design of evil powers. And if lib- 
erty means no more than the right to strive 
with each other for material gain or intellec- 
tual superiority; if the state can do no more 
than foster a civilization founded in such a 
freedom, then the evolution of present civil- 
ization from feudalism was the irreparable ruin 
of the world. The conception that freedom 
consists in the protection of men from one 
another in social antagonisms, rather than in 
their association with each other in social 
sacrifice, can never bring forth any order but 
that of tyranny and slavery. The worship 
of Baal and Moloche was relatively no more 
degrading and dehumanizing than the concep- 
tion of the state as a commercial compact 


56 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


and secular institution, with only police func- 
tions to procure individual liberty and protect 
property. If the state has fundamentally and 
finally any business that is not comprehended 
in the discovery and organization of society 
in the highest right known to man, and the 
redemption of man from all known wrong, 
then the state is a fraud and a tyranny, and 
has no right to exist and have authority over 
man. | 

And there are not two kinds of right, one 
for the state and another for the individual. 
A first step toward social justice and political 
virtue must be the emancipation of society 
from bondage to the evil imagination that 
there are different kinds of right. If there 
is a principle of right anywhere in the uni- 
verse, it is right everywhere, or there is no. 
universe of God, and there can be no unity of 
man. The wicked fancy that there are differ- 
ent standards of right for different spheres of 
life is the essence of anarchy ; it is the destruc- 
tion of both faith and order. There is not one 
kind of right for God and another for man; 


THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 57 


one for the church and another for the market ; 
one for the individual and another for the 
state; one for men acting individually, and - 
another for men acting collectively, as a polit- 
ical commonwealth or a financial corporation. 
There is not a religious quality of right distinct 
from a political or economic quality of right. 
If there is any right at all, it must be both uni- 
versal in operation and universally particular in 
application. The will of God cannot be any 
different on earth from the will of God in the 
heavens. Whatever principle of right is au- 
thoritative to a man’s moral reason, in the 


inmost consciousness of his being, is unmodi- 


g 
fied and no less commanding when he enters 
the market, the stock exchange, or the munici- 
pality, as an economic or social resident. If 
I am my brother’s keeper as a religious man, I 
am equally my brother’s keeper as an economic 
or political man, bound to make my place of 
business, and the nation of which I am a mem- 
ber, each the keeper of my brother. If there is 
a divine law of service in my conscience that 


compels me to seek work for my brother, that 


55 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


he may earn bread, then that law is equally 
authoritative when men act collectively as a 
state; and the state as a moral being, and as 
the social organ, is bound to procure work by 
which its citizens may find bread. Nothing is 
so unreasoning and fatal to both Christianity 
and the nation as the notion, which the fear of 
the older socialism begets, that it is dangerous 
and destructive for men to organize, to act to- 
eether for their common welfare — making the 
strength of each the common blessing of all, 
instead of each wasting much of his own and 
his neighbor’s life in exclusiveness and conflict. 
There is in the way of progress no worse reli- 
gious and political infidelity, obstructive to both 
Christianity and democracy, than the idea that 
men can practise a kind of right that is saving 
in limited individual action, but destructive to 
order if practised by men collectively in or- 
ganized action. The religious and _ political 
selfishness that so wickedly seeks to foster 
and strengthen this idea is betraying both 
the church and the nation. Except the state 
become the organ of the law which God has 


THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 59 


written in the moral reason of the world with 
the instrument of the cross, it cannot fulfil its 
mission in the association of men in that qual- 
ity of justice which constitutes the divine unity 
of human life. 

Now, the force that is most strongly unify- 
ing and centralizing the faith and effort of the 
world is the social revelation of human life in 
Jesus Christ. The one universal fact of prog- 
ress is that humanity is conscious of a quality 
of right potential within, which finds its perfect 
incarnation, expression, and development in the 
moral nature of Jesus. The person of Christ 
exhausts the possibilities of human comprehen- 
sion and consciousness. If we could pierce 
the hate and strife, the vice and shame, the 
selfishness and institutional power, the self- 
deceit and fraudulent sincerity, the theology 
and scepticism, of the world mind of this mo- 
ment, we would find it to be a Christ mind. 
There is not a school of religion, philosophy, 
or politics that will not to-day agree that the 
mind of Jesus is the right mind to have. Brah- 


min and Jew, agnostic and theologian, Chris- 


60 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


tian and Mohammedan, will confess that the 
spirit of Christ is the best and most unifying 
spirit the world knows. Many will deny that 
his right is practicable. Some will say that 
Gautama and others taught the ethics of the 
Sermon on the Mount before Jesus’ time. By 
some the authenticity of the records of his 
life will be denied. The mere theologian will 
sternly direct us to a way of salvation through 
metaphysics rather than right. Yet if we 
could get men to forget a while the things 
upon which they disagree, if we would put 
away our partisanships and rid our minds of 
the weighty irrelevancies of ‘theology, we 
would find universal agreement that the mind 
of Christ, actually received and practised as 
the spirit of human action and institutions, 
would procure that perfect justice which would 
secure perfect peace. The mind of Christ is 
the disclosure of the hidden mind of humanity, 
and his person the prophecy of our yet un- 
grown human race. The waking social con- 
sciousness of the world is the evolution of the 


Christ mind of man; it is the race coming to 


THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 6I 


a consciousness of its Christ nature and Christ 
destiny. Of all the world’s teachers, no one 
but Jesus has presented a philosophy of life 
that universally appeals to the common spir- 
itual sense. His person interprets man’s so- 
cial nature, and satisfies the increasing social 
thought and faith. He alone has given and 
defined a science of human association, of so- 
ciety, that comprehends all the interests of 
man, and converges all social forces. Jesus is 
the personal fulfilment, the objective revelation, 
of the social potentiality of the race. Of the 
invisible government of the world, of the na- 
ture of its authority and the end of its domin- 
ion, of the character of its laws with their 
retributive and redemptive forces, of the des- 
tiny and unity toward which man is being 
borne, the person and sacrifice of Jesus are 
the complete and eternal disclosure. 

The state, then, must become Christian if it 
is to be the organ of the social unity which 
is the present search and determination of the 
peoples, and which it is the true mission of the 
state to accomplish. Except the state be born 


62 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


again, except it be delivered from pagan doc- 
trines of law and government, from commercial 
and police conceptions of its functions, from 
merely individualistic theories of freedom, it 
cannot see the divine social kingdom, without 
which it cannot itself endure and increase. If 
the state would be saved from the wrath of the 
rising social passion, it must believe on Christ 
as its Lord, and translate his sacrifice into its 
laws. Our institutions must become the or- 
ganized expression of Christ’s law of love, if 
the state is to obey the coming social con- 
science that is to command great moral rev- 
olutions in political thought and action. For 
society is the organized sacrifice of the people. 

I see nothing strange or unreasonable about 
the proposal to make the mind of Christ the 
mind of our legislation and organizations. If 
such a mind as Christ’s can inspire and direct 
the whole action of one man, it is not impossi- 
ble or incomprehensible that such a mind 
should inspire men collectively and politically. 
It does not seem mystical to me to believe that 
the mind of Christ shall become the creative 


THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 63 


spirit of political action, and express itself in 
the statutes of the state. The state does not 
need to legislate in religious phraseology in 
order to be the social organ of the Christian 
life of the people, or translate the clear prin- 
ciples of Christ’s law of human relations into 
our national ideals and development. When 
I speak of society or the state receiving the 
mind of Christ as the mind of political action 
and social unity, I mean the common faith and 
will of men to fuse their differences, justify 
their inequalities, universalize their interests, 
communize their aims and efforts, in making 
the quality of right that was in Christ’s mind 
and action, the power and element, the mind 
and spirit, of political association and collective 
action. I know of no other kind of justice that 
will give social peace, or truth that will give 
political freedom, than the justice and truth 
personalized and disclosed in Jesus. It is be- 
cause I seek a just social order, which can 
come only through political organization and 
action, that I speak in the name of Jesus as 


the only name given among men whereby the 


64 THE CHRISTIAN STATE, 


state can fulfil its mission in being the organ 
through which God shall make society whole. 
Not only must the state become Christian, 
but Christianity must become political. The 
only way by which Christianity can, in the 
largest sense, be put into practice is through 
possessing the state as its organ — the one or- 
gan of both Christianity and society. Christi- 
anity needs the state for its realization as much 
as the state needs Christianity for its redemp- 
tion and perfection. Christianity can supply 
the only forces that can procure social justice, 
and the state is the only organ through which 
these forces can work constructively upon and 
within the whole people. There can be no 
adequate actualization of Christianity in the 
world except it actualize itself in the political 
life of the nation. The people can never 
be wholly Christian until the state become 
the organized Christianity of the people. The 
unity of the whole people with God in the 
mind of Christ must proceed through the state. 
It. is through the state that Christianity will 
have to organize the people in the social order 


THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 65 


of the communion of the Holy Ghost. The 
Christian state will be the political realization 
of Christ’s quality of right, which has been 
surely proceeding in its conquest of the world, 
in spite of the apostasies and betrayals, the di- 
visions and tyrannies, that are the misery and 
shame of Christendom. Jesus Christ is the 
ruler of the kings of the earth, and Christianity 
is sent to discipline the nations and their gov- 
ernments. 

The notion that the union of religion and 
politics can be only evil is as morally insane as 
the notion that only evil can come from the 
union of God and man. It is not the unity of 
religion and politics that brings degradation 
and tyranny; but the false unity of unspiritual 
religion and immoral politics. And the cure 
for this false unity is not the disunion of reli- 
gion and politics, but the unity of religion and 
politics in the mind of Christ. For the two 
are one and not two; and the conception of 
religion as being non-political, and of politics 
as being non-religious, is the blasphemy with 
which a material civilization turns the people 


66 THE CHRISTIAN STATS. 


from the worship of the living God to the wor- 
ship of idols of wood and stone, of iron and 
gold, and of cunning devices of the covetous 
mind. The state is a religious organism. Pol- 
itics 1s religion, true or false, and nothing else. 
Human institutions are the organization of re- 
ligion of some quality, whether we would have 
it so in theory or not. The people act politi- 
cally what they believe religiously. The pol1- 
tics of the people is a living record of their 
religious faith. Whatever the religion may be, 
whether it be politically acknowledged or not, 
the state is the realized religion of the people. 
Though the church should be pure enough 
to be the organ through which Christ’s social 
forces come, it is through the state that the 
Christian religion must realize the perfect so- 
ciety of the kingdom of God. 

The realization upon the earth of the king- 
dom of heaven, in the light of whose truth 
the nations shall walk and the people grow in 
knowledge, will be the fundamental idea in 
the evolution of the Christian state. The glory 
and authority of the state will be fulfilled in 


THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 67 


preparing the way of that kingdom, whose free- 
dom will not consist in making men indepen- 
dent of each other, but in associating them 
in the dependence that is divine and universal. 
Out of his love for the world God gave to it 
the state to be the organ through which he 
should execute the justice of love among the 
collective peoples, and bring them into the 
unity of the one perfect law of service revealed 
and interpreted in the sacrifice of Christ. 

A Christian political philosophy will con- 
ceive anew our doctrines of the relations of 
nations to one another. The nation is a social 
being. The nation that is Christian will not 
live unto itself, but be the witness of Christ 
to the nations that have not received his mind 
as their power and justice. The nation is 
under the same obligation to sacrifice itself 
for the redemption of the world that Jesus 
was. It must be the missionary of the king- 
dom of God to the nations that walk not yet 
in the light of that kingdom. The nation is 
the keeper of neighbor nations as truly as 
man is the keeper of his brother. Selfishness 


68 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


is as suicidal to the nation, in the policy of 
the state, as it is wicked and destructive in 
the life of the individual. The nation can no 
more prosper selfishly, or protect itself at the 
expense of other nations, without the eventual 
corruption of its own being, than the man. 
A Christian national policy would compel the 
state, as the organ of the nation’s being, not 
only to refrain from doing evil to neighbor 
nations, but to do them good. Asa Christian 
nation, we are as bound to sacrifice ourselves 
in procuring justice for Japan, in giving free- 
dom to the Russians, in helping to save united 
Italy from disaster, in protecting Armenian 
Christians, as we are to defend our shores 
against a foreign invasion. I do not mean 
that our national efforts to save should be 
military, but profoundly Christian and divinely 
insistent. The state can neither become nor 
remain Christian without becoming the wit- 
ness and apostle to all nations of the divine 
government of the world which Jesus disclosed. 
The Christian state is ordained of God to es- 
tablish and fulfil the authority and unity of 


THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 69 


his Christ within and between the nations, so 
that his kingdom may fully come. The prin- 
ciple of non-intervention, which has been our 
national boast and conceit, if practised long 
enough, would end in dissolution within and 
destruction from without. The principle is 
essentially pagan, and is a rejection of the 
kingdom of God and the authority of his 
Christ. The law of the cross which Jesus 
disclosed, commanded, and obeyed is as au- 
thoritative to the state as to the person; it 
is personal, national, and universal law. And 
except the state believe on the Lord Jesus 
Christ, and become the political organization 
Giese’ Sacrifice, it can neither save nor be 
saved in the social trial that is coming to try 
the whole inhabited earth. | 

I see in our land the beginnings of a great 
political movement, inspired for the purpose 
of translating the righteousness of Christ into 
the legislation of the nation, and the making 
of his mind the national political sense. This 
movement will not make a declaration of in- 
dependence, and will raise no cry for rights ; 


7O THE CHRISTIAN STATE 


it will begin with a confession of the mutual 
dependence of all men, and issue a sacred call 
for the fellowship of sacrifice. Association, 
not individual liberty, will be the movement’s 
watchword and hope of glory. It may be a 
while among the despised things of the world, 
but it will fulfil the apostle’s vision of the 
mighty Michael and his hosts of warrior 
angels casting out the great dragon which | 
symbolizes the worship of material forces. I 
believe that this political movement of Chris- 
tianity, divinely sustained through the testi- 
mony and sacrifice of its servants who love 
not their life unto death, will finally travail 
and prevail in a new birth of our govern- 
ment, and begin the Christian state which will 
realize in our nation the divine government 


of the world which Jesus disclosed. 


1698 


THE CHRISTIAN STATE 
it 2 ‘ THE 
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SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. 


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THE stupid cry has come down through all the ages, and we 
hear it yet, ‘‘ Don’t disturb the existing order of things. Leave 
matters alone.’? ‘There can be no advance of the human race 
without a change in the existing order of things. Popular edu- 
cation has been and always will be the great disturber and im- 
prover of the existing order of things. Diffusion of human 
knowledge, and change in the existing order of things, have 
come down from the twilight of fable hand in hand. The exist- 
ing order of things may be the worst possible order of things. 
The existing order of things crucified Jesus because he was a 
denouncer of the existing order of things; and in this en- 
lightened nation the existing order of things, even during the 
lifetime of those of us who are still called young, was that one 
human being might own another, and good men were mobbed 
and killed for objecting to it. We owe all that we have to the 
steady advance of the human race against the compact mass of 
those who have always cried out, and still cry out as lustily as 
ever, ‘‘ Don’t disturb the existing order of things.”’ 

My friends, we can well take home with us from here a sub- 
ject for grave thought. This meeting is for the grave purpose 
of raising money to give in charity, not to the lame, the sick, or 
the helpless, but to healthy, strong, and skilful men, able and 
anxious to work to get food, clothing, and shelter, but who can- 
not get work to do. Let this meeting remind us, and let us 
never forget, that while the human race has advanced, while 
the condition of men has steadily grown better, our social sys- 
tem is still imperfect. Can it be that in the wisdom of the 
Godhead there is not some social and political system under 
which it would be impossible for any man to starve to death, 
simply because he could not get work to do with his hands, 
when the earth passesses and produces much more than abun- 
dance for all? Let us not doubt it, but assist in moving for- 
ward to it. Mankind is advancing on toward perfection. It 
has not reached the goal. Let us not be content to believe 
that everything is just as it ought to be, and also cry out, 
‘‘Leave things as they are; change nothing; but let us 
listen, read, and inquire. Let us give heed to those who point 
out what they claim are the fundamental defects or wrongs in 
our system which make possible the distressing fact which calls 
us together to-night, and thus let the social and political evolu- 
tion of mankind continue onward and upward. Certainly there 
are causes for the condition which makes us assemble here. 
What are they? Let us not be afraid to inquire. — Fudge 
William $F. Gaynor. 


BLES: 


Spee RIsIIAN STATE THE SOCIAL 
Pei ZAlLION OF DEMOCRACY. 


TueE work of the Christian apostle is not to 
create a new social order, but to discover and 
interpret the divine order that has been the 
government of human life from its beginning. 
Men are seeking to construct a juster society ; 
but the order of absolute justice was estab- 
lished in the sacrifice of the Lamb slain from 
the foundation of the world. Men are looking 
for the kingdom of God, and would hasten its 
coming; but the kingdom of our God has come, 
and the authority of his Christ is here, judging 
and ruling the nations. There has been no 
other government of the world, no other order 
of society among men, than the kingdom of 
God; all else has been disorder and anarchy. 
The social difficulties and perplexities that 

73 


74 THE CHRISTIAN ‘SJAmae 


threaten and baffle, the political strain that 
our institutions are not ready to meet, are the 
fruits of our forgetfulness, disobedience, and 
unbelief toward the real government of God in 
which we live. The saving work to be done is 
the renewal of our faith in the divine order; the 
quickening of our sense of its presence and 
power; the revealing to our minds of its justice 
and peace. The true science of society will 
discover and interpret the social forces of the 
kingdom of heaven that is on the earth, and 
apply them to our disturbed social conditions. 
A. Christian political philosophy will teach us 
how to translate Christ’s law of sacrifice into 
economic association and political organization, 
into the statutes of the state; so that the 
state shall become the visible incarnation and 
expression of the invisible divine government 
of the world which Jesus made known and 
established anew. 

The political realization will be a pure democ- 
racy. Christianity can realize itself in a social 
order only through democracy, and democracy 


can realize itself only through the social forces 


SOCIAL KEALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. 75 


of Christianity. A pure social democracy is 
the political fulfilment of Christianity; the 
political organization of Christ’s law of love; 
the order through which faith in the right 
manifests itself in the freedom of man. The 
old Hebrew idea of God dwelling in the midst 
of the people constituted in a free common- 
wealth expresses the fact and method of de- 
mocracy. The true democracy is still better 
defined by the apostolic term, “the communion 
of the Holy Ghost,” by which term is meant 
the concord of the people in righteousness ; 
the government of the people by a spirit of 
unity within, rather than by a dominion over 
them. History is the progressive disclosure of 
the self-government of the people as the provi- 
dential design. Christianity in its fulfilment 
is the self-government of the people through 
communion with God, through the surrender 
of the common will to do the righteous will 
expressed in Christ. It is the historical and 
providential idea that God shall lead the people 
by his Spirit of right as his sons, governing 


them inspirationally rather than institutionally. 


76 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


Institutions that are democratic in fact, will 
be organs that shall both inspire and obey the 
people, rather than organs of dominion with 
the people for their servants. "DRG @emrsea: 
democracy is the political redemption and 
perfection of man in the human life revealed 
in Christ. 

Nothing can be more presumptuous than the 
literature which treats of the triumph or failure 
of democracy. As yet democracy can scarcely 
be considered to have been an experiment. It 
has not been tried. A government )@netme 
people by the people is a dream yet to be 
realized. There do not exist any purely demo- 
cratic institutions. Wherein democracy has 
been thought triumphant, it has been the 
triumph of expediencies substituted for democ- 
racy ; wherein it has failed, something less than 
democracy has been the experiment. 

We Americans are not a democratic people. 
We do not select the representatives we elect ; 
we do not make our own laws; we do not gov- 
ern ourselves, Our political parties are con- 
trolled by private, close political corporations 


SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. ei 


that exist as parasites upon the body politic, 
giving us the most corrupting and humiliating 
despotisms in political history, and tending to 
destroy all political faith in righteousness. Our 
legislation is determined by a vast system of 
lobby. The people know, though they cannot 
prove, that our legislative methods have become 
the organization of indirect bribery and corrup- 
tion. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that 
the chief work of both State and National legis- 
latures in recent years has been to obstruct, 
defeat, or cheat the will of the people. Instead 
of being democratically governed, we are under 
the government of political and legislative bu- 
reaucracies that dominate, plunder, and oppress 
by an indirection that conceals both the reality 
and the nature of the dominion, corruption, and 
oppression. Our American Senate, with mem- 
bers openly and shamelessly elected as the vir- 
tual agents of vicious corporate properties, has 
been seriously reminding us of the court of 
Louis XVI. The moral tone of our politics 
has become so low, and the power of immoral 


wealth so subtle and strong, that we have al- 


78 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


most ceased to think of our institutions as hav- 
ing any relation to political morality. Though 
we have constitutional means for overthrowing 
our present system of government by political 
bureaucracies and corporate wealth, and real- 
izing a true government by the people, we 
are scarcely trying to utter our real political 
thought and faith through our institutions. 
The politicians who control our political or- 
ganizations are ignorant of what the people 
really think and believe. They are, largely 
insensible to the rising tide of social feeling 
and purpose that will yet sweep away the 
foundations of political faith and order, unless 
recognized and received as a national regen- 
eration. A great political uprising, like that 
under the leadership of Dr. Parkhurst in New 
York, while a cause for profound national 
gratitude and hope, has yet a sad signifi- 
cance in the fact that it is the result of an 
extra-governmental organization to protect the 
people from the official administration of an 
existing government. And this extra-govern- 


mental organization has been performing the 


SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. 79 


highest functions of the great municipal gov- 
ernment within which it exists. So through- 
out the land, organizations which are virtually 
governments within governments are rapidly 
forming to perform the holiest duties of gov- 
ernmental offices, which were instituted to pro- 
tect the people in freedom and perfect them in 
justice, but have become the instruments of 
lawlessness and oppression. Necessitated by 
the surrender which the people have made of 
their authority and institutions to usurping 
political corporations, organizations are being 
effected by aroused citizens to protect them- 
selves from the administration of governments 
which should be the organized virtue of the 
people. 

The jobbers in politics, making the affairs 
of the public well-being their political stock 
exchange, strive to create the impression that 
they represent the actual political faith of the 
people. Through deceiving the people they 
have procured an increasing centralization of 
political power. It is this centralization of 


power, used mainly to serve for political and 


SO LHE CHRISTIAN Sia 


material profit the interests of privileged 
classes, that has caused the political degra- 
dation and indolence of the people. Only — 
the responsibility of power educates the people 
to administer power, and reveals the common 
moral worth. Not the centralization, but the 
diffusion of power is the safety of the pres- 
ent; it is also the lesson of history and the 
divine method of procedure. Unbelief in God 
is no more fatal to freedom and progress, to 
justice and right, than unbelief in the people. 
Only through becoming the organ of the com- 
mon faith and aspiration, the common life, the 
holy life, the moral well-being, the common 
wholeness, of the whole people, can the State 
endure the social strain and change, and prove 
its right to be. Such it can become wonty 
through the realization of the democracy that 
will politically organize the people in the order 
of life begun with the birth of the Christ 
man. 

We can no more stop the progress of democ- 
racy where it now is than we can take the race 
back to the garden of Eden, From the idea of 


SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. SI 


the absolute monarch, we have progressed to 
the idea of representative institutional govern- 
ment. But we have scarcely reached the half- 
way house of political progress. We shall have 
to move on to the goal, which is the fulfilment 
of democracy in the direct self-government of 
the people. In a pure democracy the people 
will be their own legislators, making their own 
laws directly, or through an elective and repre- 
sentative system that will receive and effectuate 
in legislation the actual will of the people. Ex- 
isting representative legislation and representa- 
tive government are as distinctly two forms 
of government as the absolute and the limited 
monarchy. There can be no true democracy 
with present systems of representative legisla- 
tion. And these have accomplished the begin- 
nings of their own doom. There have been 
few important measures before our state or 
national legislatures during the last decade 
which could not have been passed upon by the 
people themselves with intelligence and charac- 
ter, with thoroughness and directness, wholly 
beyond the moral or intellectual comprehension 


82 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


of the men, many of them virtually self-chosen, 
now legislating as the people’s representatives. 

A step toward the political realization of 
democracy would be the change of our repre- 
sentative system so as to secure proportional 
representation. Our legislative district order 
of representation, arbitrarily and corruptly 
managed in the interests of the particular pol- 
iticlans in power, instead of with a view to 
providing for the immediate and accurate ex- 
pression of the will of the people, practically 
deprives a large proportion, often a majority, of 
the people of any representation in the affairs 
of legislation. For instance, in the State of 
Iowa, of which State I am a citizen, in the 
election of 1892, the 219,215 votes cast by one 
political party elected ten members to our na- 
ional Congress ; while the 201,293 votes cast 
by another party elected but one congressman ; 
and two minor parties were without representa- 
tion. Fully if not more than one-half of the 
people of Iowa were thus unrepresented, and 
doubtless misrepresented, in the popular and 


more democratic branch of the national legisla- 


\ 


SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. 83 


ture. The instance I have noted simply indi- 
cates — though many more glaring instances 
could be cited —the utter caricature of repre- 
sentative government which our legislative 
district system has procured. It has put the 
whole legislation of our land, both State and 
National, into the keeping of the political bu- 
reaucracies —the speculators who thrive and 
fatten through marketing the rights and well- 
being of the people to corporate properties, 
while the people are made to think themselves 
represented in legislation. By recent elections, 
more than one-half of the people in the United 
States are not represented in the national coun- 
cils, because of our district systems and party 
control of legislation. Really, we are not repre- 
sentatively governed, and the majofity does not 
rule. Representative legislation and govern- 
ment are a fiction, so far as our nation is con- 
cerned. The majority of our citizens, not far 
from two-thirds at present, are virtually disfran- 
chised, and we are under the government of 
minorities; the majority is without power to 
effect legislation. Prof. John R. Commons 


84 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


of Indiana University, whom I regard as our 
most promising and divinely opportune political 
economist, and who has made an exact and 
thoughtful study of the subject of proportional 
representation, says: “ True representative gov- 
ernment does not exist. We have a sham rep- 
resentation. It gives a show of fairness; but 
it is crude and essentially unfair. It does not 
represent the people. It represents the politi- 
cians. We are a law-abiding people. Yet our 
laws are made by a minority of the people, 
and by an irresponsible oligarchy more danger- 
ous than that our fathers revolted against.” 
The only possible deliverance from this oligar- 
chic and minority government is in some form 
of proportional representation that will enable 
all parties and degrees of political and even 
religious opinion, according to the votes cast 
by each, to be represented in National, State, 
and municipal councils. It is through a system 
of proportional representation, and the system 
of electing from any borough, any strong man, 
from any part of the United Kingdom, that 


England has made such strides in popular gov- 


SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCKACY. 85 


ernment, and that the people there have been 
able to effectuate their will far more accurately 
and immediately than the people of the United 
States. Through proportional representation, 
it is now commonly agreed, the people of Eng- 
land are in reality altogether more democrati- 
cally governed than the people of America, 
notwithstanding what remains to England of 
feudalism. In the English Parliament the Irish 
minority, the temperance minority, the sin- 
gle-tax minority, the labor minority, the Rad- 
ical minority, the Roman Catholic minority, 
are all represented. A just proportional rep- 
resentation in our nation, with certain of the 
initiative and referendum features of legislation 
conjoined, would give to the people a represen- 
tative system that might practically prove to 
be, would indeed virtually be, the direct legis- 
lation of the people for the people, and would 
initiate and preserve a true political democracy. 
Then the people would grow in political knowl- 
edge and virtue, with the purifying sense and 
divine moral dignity of responsibility. And the 


education in justice which association in de- 


86 THE CHRISTIAN STATEa 


mocracy would give, with the continued trial 
of faith in righteousness which the mutualism 
of power would procure, would develop in the 
people the wisdom and forces of their com- 
mon moral reason, their now waking social 
consciousness, which is nothing else than the 
intelligence of the Spirit of God, inspiring, en- 
lightening, and directing the mind and affairs 
of man toward the unity of the race. 

But democracy only begins its real struggle 
and work in becoming political; it must be- 
come social. Unless democracy retreat from 
the field of progress, it must take possession 
of the industrial world. The government of 
the future will be mainly concerned with the 
social being and industrial association of the 
people. Political freedom can realize itself 
only through industrial freedom. The life of 
man is objectively an economic life. In the 
sphere of production and distribution is the 
common life fulfilled. Production is commun- 
ion with God; the producer is God’s co-worker. 
Distribution is human fellowship; it is the 


method by which justice unites men. Until 


SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. 87 


democracy be the order of production and dis- 
tribution, it will be an illusive philosophy and 
baffled effort, and industrial slavery will be the 
inevitable lot of millions. It is unreasonable, 
and morally intolerable; it is the social contin- 
uation of the old absolutism, that the well-being 
of the people should depend, as it in large 
measure does depend under the present econ- 
omy, upon the will of the few who possess the 
quality of power essential to reaping the har- 
vest of the common toil, and whose authority 
consists in the possession of material things. 
The people must finally own and distribute the 
products of their own labor, and economic de- 
mocracy must now be the search of political 
wisdom that would command an intelligent re- 
spect and the social patience. 

The acceptance of any theory of human life 
that is really Christian, inevitably demands a 
society based upon mutualism in the respon- 
sibility of all for the whole life of each, as 
against the animal] theory of competition. The 
condition of competition is inconsistent with 
both Christianity and democracy. Neither 


88 THE CHRISTIAN STALE 


Christianity nor democracy can be realized, or 
make much farther progress, except through 
the progressive association of men in an eCco- 
nomic commonwealth. A true social democ- 
racy is the only ultimate political realization 
of Christianity, and industrial freedom through 
economic association is the only Christian real- 
ization of democracy. The economy of compe- 
tition must come to an end, or both democracy 
and Christianity will come to an end, and the 
hope of justice be lost in social despair. 

The assumption of competition as the law 
of life and development has been the fatal 
mistake of the social and economic sciences. 
Competition has been the condition of much 
of the struggle for life it is true, Dubeigeeiee 
law. The struggle for life has never been 
fundamentally competitive, and is on its way 
to become wholly altruistic. In his book of 
revelation called ‘“‘“The Ascent of Man, shrce 
fessor Drummond clearly shows the dogma of 
competition as the chief law of natural growth 
to be a misreading of nature; he discerns that 


in nature it is the co-operative forces that pre- 


SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. 89 


vail. A more scientific interpretation of his- 
tory than we have had, will reveal the altruistic 
and sacrificial forces to have been the makers 
of progress. All the sciences may one day re- 
veal to us, in one way and another, that competi- 
tion has been always and everywhere destructive 
to life, and the foe of development. Compett- 
tion is in fact the negation of society ; and such 
society as we have exists through the restriction 
of competition. The evolution of society is the 
elimination of competition through the progres- 
sive introduction of altruistic forces. 

Even if competition were once good, it is 
not now good. There no longer exists an 
honest expectation of freedom or justice in a 
competitive system based upon what is practi- 
cally an exclusive private ownership of prop- 
erty. Notwithstanding our competitive philos- 
ophy, the natural and unalterable result of the 
system is the wealth and power of the few, 
and the poverty and social oppression of the 
many ; the exploitation of the truly industrious 
by the speculative and cunning ; the toil of the 


millions to produce social benefits possessed 


gO LHE CHRISTIAN STAGE 


by the tens. The life of the economic people 
thus becomes not only a struggle for exist- 
ence, but a fearful social chance. The average 
workman, though an independent wage-earner 
and politically free, is less certain of food for 
his family than was the feudal slave of some 
kind of food. No thrift or integrity, no faith- 
fulness to work or uprightness of character, 
can guarantee men against loss of employment 
in the present system of competitive industrial- 
ism, issuing in the social irresponsibility and 
absolutism of the strongest competitor. 

By its ability to accomplish the development 
of the individual, must every civilization and 
institution be judged. The full development 
of each individual life is the true end of civili- 
zation, and no order has a right to our accept- 
ance which presents any other social motive or 
aim. The end of the civilization at which the 
collectivist aims is not, as some ignorantly and 
others wickedly say, the rejection, but the sal- 
vation, of the individual. It is just this individ- 
ual development that our competitive civilization 


fails to either justly or adequately procure. The 


SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. Ql 


triumphs of the competitive struggle have lain 
more in the elimination than in the introduc- 
tion of practicable and Christian opportunity 
for the development of the individual life. In 
the present strain and anxiety of the struggle 
for home and bread, not one in many has any 
adequate opportunity for individual develop- 
ment. The social stress and uncertainty which 
consume the life and faith alike of the success- 
ful and the unsuccessful, make against the 
rational and holiest development of spirit, mind, 
and body. Were it not for the pathos of hu- 
man life under any aspect it presents in the 
existing order of things, and the moral tragedy 
of it all as men crush and grind and devour one 
another in the competitive struggle, — eating 
each other’s flesh and drinking each other’s 
blood, making each other homeless and indi- 
rectly starving each other’s children, — it would 
be indeed a divine comedy to disclose the op- 
portunities for individual development presented 
by modern industrialism. How many of the 
thousands toiling to-night in sweaters’ shops 


have any opportunity for individual develop- 


Q2 THE CHRISTIAN SLATES 


ment; and how many of the two million chil- 
dren who have toiled or begged in our land 
to-day? What opportunity for individual de- 
velopment have the tillers of our Western em- 
pire of mortgaged farms, or the employees of 
the street railways of our cities? and what is 
the opportunity of our million unemployed 
laborers, or of the millions employed at not 
much beyond an average of three hundred 
dollars for a yearly wage? Nobly has Swan 
Sonnenschein of London said: ‘Lay your 
strong hand upon the strugglers, restrain their 
violent eagerness, reduce them to order and 
system; and in the multifarous requirements of 
your every-day social life, you may find nooks 
and corners which the weakest of these weak- 
lings may be competent to fill usefully and 
honorably and happily. But while they are 
all hustling and battling together, it is the 
strong and the competent only who can elbow 
their way to the front—the strong and the 
competent and the self-asserting, those who 
-are well able to take care of themselves, and 


are not, perhaps, greatly hindered by any scru- 


SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. 93 


ples as to their mode of doing it; while the 
eentle and diffident, the timorous and weak 
and scrupulous, —all whose peculiarities do not 
quite run in the ways of the world, very ad- 
mirable and worthy though their peculiarities 
may sometimes be, —all these go down in the 
struggle by the thousand; and though perhaps 
they may not often die of actual starvation, 
they just ebb away. You can see the people 
dying of mere inanition and broken hearts.” 
And this describes human conditions in a civili- 
zation which produces enough for the physical 
comfort and economic freedom of all, if only 
a method were adopted for the reasonable dis- 
tribution of production in equity and right- 
eousness. 

But our competitive order intellectually 
dwarfs and morally distorts the successful as 
well as the unsuccessful. It is not the rule 
of the fittest that survives the struggle of in- 
dustrial competition. The evolution of our 
competitive and speculative system is the rule 
of the unfittest. The theory of society in 
which such a system is founded incites the 


04 THE CHRISTIAN STAVE 


lowest qualities of human life. It offers im- 
moral motives to human effort, and degrad- 
ing rewards to human energy. It grounds 
society in moral unfaith, and makes social trea- 
son the highest qualification for success. It 
has produced the fact that the prevalent stan- 
dards of commercial integrity and honor are 
fundamentally wrong when judged by the 
teachings of Christ. Even the older pagan 
ethic and modern agnostic social philosophy 
regard the desire and strife to acquire prop- 
erty for private gratification and power, rather 
than for the common well-being, as a profana- 
tion of life. But they who most profanely 
succeed are the social lords who have dominion 
over us in these days. Not only have these 
lords taken away the hope of freedom, with 
which hope modern life so vitally and glori- 
ously began, but they have given us the most 
atheistic, and in some respects the worst, des- 
potism —the hardest to overcome because of 
the comprehensiveness as well as indirection 
of its rule. 

A socially monstrous fact of our competitive 


wOC/HL HEALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. 95 


civilization is its over-production of middle- 
men. There are ten men between producer 
and consumer where but one is needed. Our 
system has thus created a vast class of specu- 
lating exchangers, a social order of parasitism, 
which produces nothing, and yet consumes 
production. The most honored and powerful 
members of society to-day are its parasites. 
A great army of speculators and competing 
tradesmen, which ought to be put to the 
honest work of producing something for so- 
ciety, preys upon its producers, gambles with 
its necessities, adulterates its foods, and viti- 
ates both its purchases and purchasing power. 
I do not condemn men because they are buy- 
ers and sellers, or question that among those 
who buy and sell are some of society’s noblest 
and purest characters. But the system and 
spirit which cause this over-production of ex- 
changers, which give the gains of production 
to non-producers, and necessitate the under- 
consumption of economic goods on the part 
of producers, I condemn as _ fundamentally 


destructive to social right and moral order. 


96 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


And I express the common moral sense of the 
people when I declare those who enrich and 
empower themselves through the arbitrary con- 
trol of production and distribution, through 
the speculative control of transportation and 
exchange, to be society's most dangerous 
enemies ; they are not only the chief social 
parasites, but are destroyers of the nation’s 
life. This waste of the people’s substance is 
inconsistent with any rational organization of 
society, and is fatal to the political continuity 
of the people. Our nation cannot endure the 
present social anarchy of speculative and com- 
petitive industrialism. It is destructive to the 
best forces of the individual life, and consti- 
tutes the common life in the very anti-Christ 
order of society. 

The evils of speculative industrialism are no- 
where more manifest than in speculation in 
land, which is the most subversive to social 
morality of all forms of gambling. There is 
divine reason in the old Hebrew feeling against 
land speculation as treason to the nation and 


a blasphemy against God. Compared to land 


SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY.  9Q7 


speculation, the various forms of gambling 
against which we have legislated are innocent 
of evil to society. The land and its natural re- 
sources are to be held by the state in sacred 
trust for the people, and never to be surren- 
dered. As Mulford has said, “the land belongs 
to the people constituted as a nation, and the | 
right to it is in its moral order.” In parting 
with the vast domains of the people, held by 
the nation as the communion of God with the 
national life, the birthright of the people has 
- been sold for a mess of pottage, and the gov- 
ernment and economy of the people surrendered 
to great private and speculative corporations. 
The power given these corporations has raised 
the question of government ownership of rail- 
ways, which is at present answered by a large 
measure of virtual railway ownership of the 
government. There is scarcely any longer 
a denial that our railway systems constitute 
the largest legislative influence in America ; 
and these systems have obtained their power 
through legislative gifts of the nation’s lands 


and franchises. 


98 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


But a place of repentance for our national 
prodigality may even now be found, though our 
unholy prudence be offended at the despised | 
movements that lead us to this place, in the 
five hundred and fifty million acres that remain 
of our inheritance, and that only need the wise 
and profitable employment of the unemployed 
to be converted into an empire of industry and 
fruitfulness, that shall remain the property of 
the nation, and be sold in small and conditional 
holdings, or rented in terms of years or in 
perpetuity. I see nothing to ridicule, but 
the profoundest and most prophetic economic 
statesmanship, in this proposition. And when 
the divine judgment of history passes between 
the national legislature of 1894, and the vaga- 
bond citizens who were mobbed by the police 
for bearing this proposition to the Capitol steps, 
I pray to be judged among the vagabonds. 
For, call them by what names you please, in 
the social order and political facts of a better 
national future, these men will rise up in judg- 
ment against this generation, and the cynical 


stupidity and wicked ignorance of its legislators. 


SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. 99 


The purely individualistic and unsocial theory 


of property which our competitive industrialism 


has made a foundation of society, and strength- Y¥ 


ened by all the unholy appeals that can be made 
to social selfishness, has resulted in practically 
abolishing even the possibility of private own- 
ership for the great majority of the people. 
One-tenth of our population, or even less, now 
owns nine-tenths of the wealth. The centrali- 
zation of the control of property is increasing 
with a rapidity and power that threaten both 
the industrial independence of wage-earners 
and small property-holders, and the integrity of 
the nation. The average of wages, the cer- 
tainty and continuity of employment, the social 
privileges and independence of the wage-earn- 
ing and agricultural populations, when com- 
pared with the increase of wealth and social 
production, are steadily and rapidly decreasing. 
The result of our system is and can be nothing 
else than the accumulation of vast properties 
under the control of the cunning and strong. 
It is surely time that we ceased to hear the op- 
portunity for individual development and the 


j 


100 THE CHRISTIAN STAG 


private ownership of property accredited to a 
purely competitive system as one of its virtues. | 

The logic of our competitive philosophy 
inevitably manifests itself in the estimation 
of human worth in the terms of property 
rather than of social righteousness. But prop- 
erty was made for man, and not man for 
property. Society does not exist to protect 
property, but property to support society. In 
itself property is nothing; it is simply the in- 
strument by which justice unites men. Prop- 
erty is a sacrament of the unity of life, and 
through its use men enter into fellowship with 
each other and communion with God. The 
right to property does not extend beyond the 
right social use of property. It is a terribly 
perverted system of society which subordinates, 
as ours subordinates, the social being of the 
people, of the great majority of individuals, to 
the increase of material things. 

At its best, this is no rational order of ours 
which makes the earning of a living for his 
body the chief attention of a man’s life. Man 
was not made to live by bread alone, but by 


Secret AeA LIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. IOI 


the words of life that proceed from the mouth 
of God. The earning of a living ought to be 
but the incident of any social order with which 
the sons of God have a right to be satisfied. 
But what shall we say of the irrationality and 
social blasphemy of a civilization of economic 
abundance so organized as to make even a 
decent living uncertain to the millions who 
give to the earning of it the anxious attention 
of their hourly thought, and the chief strength 
of all their years ? 

The highest industrial order which competi- 
tive individualism can give is that of capitalist 
and wage-earner. And a capitalistic and wage- 
earning order of society inevitably ends, and 
has already ended, in the economic rule of an 
industrial absolutism over a socially subject 
class. The wages system was a step in the 
evolution of freedom, but only a step; and 
without the movement of industry from free- 
dom to association, the wages system would 
lead society into a state that would only be a 
fall from feudalism. There can be no social 


freedom or complete justice until there are 


102 THE CHRISTIAN STAGE 


no more mere hirelings in the world; until 
all become both the employers and employed 
of the labor of society. Whatever the qual- © 
ity of wages, the man whom the system of 
things permits to be no more than a hireling 
is not free; and equal ability and opportunity 
to compete, even if such equality and opportu- 
nity were real, is not freedom. It is the social 
logic of competitive individualism that the hope 
of freedom is now distorted and baffled in the 
struggle of industrial absolutisms to extend 
their economic sovereignty over the many en- 
gaged in the uncertain and consuming com- 
petition for work and bread, and denied all 
right to live as becomes the sons of God. ) 

There is but one deliverance from the rule 
of the people by property, and that is the 
rule of property by the people. If much of 
what has been considered private property is 
to be absorbed in great monopolistic owner- 
ship, as seems to be the inevitable outcome 
of the competitive struggle, then the people 
should become the monopolists. The whole 


movement of modern industrial organization 


SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. 103 


has been toward monopoly, and the move- 
ment will become more rapid, comprehensive, 
and powerful as present social tendencies in- 
crease. The only hope of the people for either 
industrial or political freedom lies in their tak- 
ing lawful possession of the machinery, forces, 
and production of great industrial monopolies. 
Through the instrumentality of the state the 
people, constituted in the realized democracy 
of a social commonwealth, could organize their 
social economy in justice, that would insure 
work and bread for all who would work, as 
well as make common to all many social bene- 
fits now exclusively enjoyed by the privileged 
few; and would find some service that would 
give a measure of profit and hope to even the 
weakest. So organized, the state as the social 
organ of the people would furnish and compel 
work that would be redemptive to many now 
given over as worthless by our unsocial order 
of selfish and competitive individualism. 

And the people do not need to wait for capi- 
tal in order to become their own capitalists. If 
the people only knew it, they have not the 


104. THE CHRISTIAN STAiae 


economic, social, or political use commonly 
imaged for the capitalists who now receive so 
large a share of legislative attention and in- 
dustrial authority, besides reaping the harvest 
of the common toil. We have constitutional 
means for transferring the control of industrial 
machinery, through lawful purchase that need 
not wait for capital, from our present self-con- 
stituted industrial governments to the social 
democracy of a government of industry for and 
by the people. If the various political and 
social reforms and reformers, many of them 
encumbered by wild and hurtful schemes, could 
but be brought to unite upon a few fundamental 
political and industrial changes, such as propor- 
tional representation, government ownership of 
railways, civil service reform, government con- 
trol of certain sources of production, and thus 
eo before the people with a national social pro- 
eramme, God and the people would carry the 
programme, and some first steps toward indus- 
trial democracy would be taken. Why do we 
wait? Timidity, prejudice, ignorance, distrust 


of God and the people, a radical and destruc- 


SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. TOS 


tive conservatism of the vested interests of 
exhausted political and religious systems, must 
some day give answer to the righteous judg- 
ment of God and his awakened people. 

In the midst of the industrial tyranny and 
social anarchy in which we now find ourselves, 
it is the ignorant and the indifferent, or else 
the selfish and the powerful, who will fear and 
obstruct a progressive extension of the indus- 
trial and economic functions of the state. In 
the face of our social situation, it is unjust and 
unreasonable to cry against the collectivist as 
one who would take away our liberties. The 
economic liberties of the people have in large 
measure already been taken away. The idea 
of freedom in the unrestricted competition of 
the present system is but the tantalism of 
theorists to the social suffering. There is no 
longer among the people an expectation of 
freedom without a large measure of economic 
association, though the selfish, fearful, and un- 
believing would delay the day of association’s 
political birth. But except the state become 
the organ of economic association, and that in 


106 THE CHRISTIAN STALE 


Christ’s law of service, it cannot see the reali- 
zation of freedom, and can save neither property 
nor society. The state must be born anew, 
that the promise of liberty may be fulfilled in 
the unity of justice, and in social peace. 

The idea of the state as the organized econ- 
omy of the people is not, as some would say, 
the ancient theory, nor the Platonic concep- 
tion, that the state is the chief end of man and 
that man is made for the state, but the Chris- 
tian opposite of the ancient conception. 

The Christian collectivist would take away 
no liberty from the individual that would not 
be returned to him a hundred-fold in the liberty 
which association would give. The Christian 
economic state would take away the liberty to 
oppress and defraud, but give the liberty to 
work, to have faith, and to do justice. The 
real property rights of the people, the preser- 
vation of the home, and the perpetuity of the 
family, have their future dependence in the 
association of rights under the guardianship of 
the state as the social organ of a Christian 


democracy. Such a mutual surrender and in- 


SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. 107 


vestiture of rights, instead of endangering the 
individual and the family, would be the free- 
dom of the individual to develop the highest 
personal life, and the security of the family 
from the invasion of want and oppression. 
The collection of rights and interests in the 
state as the organ of the Christian economy of 
the people, would remove life from the sphere 
of chance to that of a moral social certainty, 
and give opportunity for that free individual 
development which is the true end of civiliza- 
tion. 

Through no other organ than the state can 
democracy procure a just conservation and 
social development of the natural resources 
which the whole people have received as a 
gift and trust from God. Centralized as it 
has now become, there can be no Christian 
administration of property except through the 
state. We can no longer hope for individual 
freedom, either political or industrial, except 
through economic association; nor can we 
hope for effective or comprehensive associa- 
tion except through the state as the social 


108 THE CHRISTIAN STAIZE 


organ of a Christian democracy. Without 
economic justice, democracy is an exhausted 
force, and Christianity cannot fulfil the king- 
dom of God among men. The state is the 
only organ through which the whole people 
can act in procuring social justice and indus- 
trial freedom, and through no other organ can 
the social forces of Christ organize the life 
and work of the people in a divine economy. 
The state must become Christian and eco- 
nomic, or democracy will fail, and become 
democratic and economic, or Christianity will 
‘fail to accomplish that for which it came into 
the world. Only through industrial democ- 
racy can the state obtain and insure political 
freedom, and Christianity cannot accomplish 
its world mission, save it effect the politi- 
cal organization of human life. The state 
must become effectively social, the organ of 
a just economic distribution and exchange of 
the productions of the people, the organ 
through which the people shall collectively 
rule property for the social good, if it is to 
become democratic in fact; and to become 


SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. IO9 


effectively social it must become Christian — 
the instrument by which the people shall be 
organized in Christ’s law of association. For 
there is no rule of property by the people, save 
the rule of the people by Christ. A Christian 
state as the organized economy of the people 
is the political realization of Christianity. And 
the political realization of Christianity is the 
organization of the people in the divine social 
democracy defined by the apostles as the com- 
munion of the Holy Ghost. 

In this lecture, I have brought you the com- 
plaint of Christ against our civilization. What- 
ever I may know or not know of the politics of 
the future, I declare to you the word of Christ, 
that this industrial order of things in which we 
live is wicked and doomed, and that the social 
traits we once glorified as its virtues are now 
become vices and tyrannies. I have seen the 
kingdom of Christ’s law and order coming to 
judge the kingdoms and laws of this world, 
and have beheld the King appearing in the 
clouds of social threat and gathering storm. 
I know the testimony of Christ, that in the 


I1oO THE CHRISTIAN STATE, 


purpose of his Father who is ours, this civili- 
zation of organized selfishness cannot abide 
the day of his political appearing, which is 
now being made manifest. I bear the wit- 
ness of Christ, that the church’s greatest apos- 
tasy, and his own present fearfu) sorrow, is 
its ignorance of the wickedness and doom of 
this social order; its want of knowledge and 
faith concerning the social order of the king- 
dom of God; its chosen impotence to lead 
the social change; its protection of the social 
wolves who prey upon the sheep it has largely 
- forsaken. Whoever may hear or not hear our 
report of the complaint and judgment of the 
appearing Christ, as we speak among the thou- 
sand thousand voices crying his coming in the 
wilderness of social confusion, until the hush 
of God shall rest upon our lips, neither you 
nor I dare keep silent. And with all these 
voices of social judgment and hope, which are 
but the one voice of the Christ whose speech 
to our day is like the voice of many waters, 
history will have to reckon in the time of the 
social change which shall manifest his sacrifice 


SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. III 


as the revelation of the universal and eternal 
law of life. And that manifestation will wit- 
ness to the divine authority of the message left 
us by our appearing Lord’s greatest modern 
English apostle, Frederick D. Maurice. “Com- 
petition,’ speaks the message, “is put forth as 
the law of the universe. This is a lie. The 
time has come to declare it is a lie by word and 
deed.” The opportunity and world movement 
to overthrow the delusion and dominion of this 
lie, with the truth and authority of the law of 
sacrifice, is the coming of Christ to this time, 
to regenerate civilization, and judge and rule 
the nations. 

The complaint and judgment of Christ are 
our social ground of hope, and the warrant of 
our faith to abound in his social work, knowing 
that our labor cannot be in vain. Our social 
troubles are preparing the earth for the lord- 
ship of the Christ who ascended unto the 
Father in heaven, only that he might come 
again to rule the earth in the moral glory of 
his full triumph, through the association of men 
in his Holy Spirit of loving service. The so- 


112 LZHE CHRISTIAN SfAgeS 


cial crisis is making way for the authority of 
Christ to rule his church and his nations in 
the law of the kingdom which is not of this 
world, which is not created by the selfishness 
and divisions and tyrannies of men, but which 
is come down out of heaven from God to de- 
stroy all these, and make the kingdoms of this 
world divine and social. ‘The social revelation 
of Christ is the unfolding of a new heaven of 
the truth of love to light a new earth wherein 
human relations are socialized through their 
organization in the justice of sacrifice. 

I do not believe that I appeal to one man of 
business who has not been convicted, perhaps 
in some moment of greatest financial success, 
perhaps always and with hidden anguish, of 
the justice of the complaint of Christ I bring 
against the existing order; who does not 
feel that this consuming and incessant strife, 
grounding his life in practical unfaith and mak- 
ing it a game of chance, is wrong and ruinous 
to his highest manhood, and ought not to be; 
who does not know in his heart that man was 


not made to so live in his relations to his fel- 


NOCJAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. is 


lows. But he fears, because he has been taught 
to fear, the faith that would attempt a better 
order; because he is trained to distrust the 
wisdom of the right and trust the strength of 
the wrong, to believe in the power of selfish- 
ness and the insufficiency of unselfishness, to 
regard self-interest as law, and sacrifice as a 
social weakness and delusion. 

For you men of the markets, caught in the 
terrible toils of this unrighteous system, de- 
stroying the hope and crushing the life of our 
men and women and children, degrading the 
vital forces of the nation we believe in and 
love, I feel with what capacity God gives me 
for sympathy. I speak not to condemn, but to 
save you, O men! and tell you that a better 
order of things draws near; an order that is 
worth your service and your failure, worth 
your living and dying. I call you to repent 
because there is a deliverance at hand, and a 
Deliverer to whom you can turn in social obe- 
dience and political faith. I do not want you 
to think, as likely you have grown to think, 
that there is something in the nature of practi- 


IIl4 THE CHRISTIAN STALE 


cal business that separates you from holy ideals 
of life; from the fellowship of sacrifice; from 
an honest discipleship in the school of Christ ; 
from pure political virtues and the search for 
social right. I respect that measure of integ- 
rity which keeps many of you from uniting 
with the church, because you discern between 
the unrighteousness of our social order and the 
righteousness of Christ ; because you will not 
openly profess a conversion to principles which 
seem to you utterly impracticable in the pres- 
ent system of commerce, and in existing kinds 
of politics. But the forces of evil are convert- 
ing this integrity of yours into a terrible de- 
ceiving of your own selves, and into a national 
danger and a social peril. For it is not true 
that the practical business of the world is any 
more irreligious by nature than the life of med- 
itation and prayer. Ido not think any life is 
so certainly and subtly ruinous to one’s intel- 
lectual integrity and true morality as the life of 
a mere student; there is no selfishness so dis- 
astrous to the humaneness and real purity of 


one’s heart as the selfishness of culture. I 


SOCIAL REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY. I15 


know of no life so destructive to pure spiritual- 
ity, to unselfish thinking and an honest sacrifi- 
cial living, to strong manhood and a divinely 
venturing faith, so conducive to self-deceit, and 
obstructive to the redemptive world work of 
God, as that of the mere officer of religion — 
historic in opposition to the advance of the 
divine life among men. It requires all the 
forces of moral help which man can receive 
from God to resist the deadly forces of selfish- 
ness which beset the officials of religion, to 
compass the ruin of their spiritual honesty and 
moral vitality ; to rob them of original courage, 
and the Christly kind of loving. The offices 
of education and religion are no more open 
to communion with God in the fellowship of 
Christ than the offices of state and the mar- 
ket. The practical work of the world is God’s 
work, and God lives in the politics of the peo- 
ple. The greatest longing I find for the social 
order of the kingdom of God is, on the one 
side, among men of large wealth, whose very 
hearts are being broken and ground in the 
system from which they know not how to ex- 


116 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


tricate themselves, and on the other side in 
assembly rooms of organized labor, where Jesus 
is sincerely, however inadequately, honored as 
the name above every other name. From these 
now apparently diverging classes of wealth and 
labor will yet come forth one holy fellowship of 
sacrifice, to follow Christ in the glory of a re- 


generated civilization. 





ok , ; ’ is ne) j a 
4 ae 
4 
IV. 
THE CHRISTIAN STATE 
a he. 
REDEMPTION OF LAW FROM ANARCHY. 
e yi! r ; 


BuT the instinct of humanity has also been quick to this: 
that the curse of ill-gotten wealth passes like bad blood from 
father to child. What is the truth in this matter? A glance at 
history will tell us. The accumulation of property is the result 
of certain customs, habits, and laws. In its own powerful in- 
terest property perpetuates these down the ages, and infects 
the fresh air of each new generation with their temper. How 
often in the history of mankind has it been property gained 
under unjust laws or cruel monopolies which has prevented the 
abolition of these, and carried into gentler, freer times the pride 
and exclusiveness of the age, by whose rude habits it was 
gathered. This moral transference, which we see on so large 
a scale in public history, is repeated to some extent in every 
private bequest. A curse does not necessarily follow an estate 
from the sinful producer of it to his heir; but the latter is, dy 
the bequest itself, generally brought into so close a contact with 
his predecessor as to share his conscience and be in sympathy 
with his temper. And the case is common where an heir, 
though absolutely, up to the date of his succession, separate 
from him who made and has left the property, nevertheless finds 
himself unable to alter the methods, or escape the temper, in 
which the property has been managed. In nine cases out of 
ten property carries conscience and transfers habits; if the 
guilt does not descend, the infection does. — Rev. George 
Adam Smith. 


IV. 


Mites ikRISTIAN STATE THE RE-— 
DEMPTION OF LAW FROM 
ANARCHY. 


THERE is no likeness between the Christian 
ideal and that of the anarchist, as Christians 
sometimes foolishly and unthinkingly admit, 
and organized selfishness eagerly charges. The 
method and ideal of the philosophical anarchist 
and the method and ideal of the Christian 
political philosopher are the exact antagonism 
of each other. The Christian organization of 
the state would be its perfection; the anarchist 
philosophy would be its destruction. A Chris- 
tian politic would fulfil the institutions of the 
state ; the anarchist policy would abolish them. 
The Christian ideal would lead the people in a 
political progress that would leave restrictive 
institutions with nothing to do, so that they 

119 


I20 THE CHRISTIAN. Sia iio 


would fall into the greater freedom thus 
achieved and die, as the acorn dies in the earth 
when the tree comes forth; the anarchist ideal 
would lead the people in a descent to the low- 
est political hell, where individual  self-will 
would establish the throne of perfect despotism 
and the order of perfect misery. The differ- 
ence between the achievement of the Christian 
ideal and the anarchist ideal is the difference 
between the coming of the kingdom of heaven 
and the coming of the kingdom of hell on the 
earth. Government is not transient, nor a 
necessary evil, but eternal in the heart of God, 
and is the discipline and education of the people 
in the image and right of the only perfectly 
governed man the world has known, the man 
Christ Jesus. The anarchist spirit that would 
destroy is the witness to the divine necessity 
of the institutions at which destruction is 
aimed. ‘The anarchist strengthens the institu- 
tions and increases the restrictive functions 
which the Christian ethic and politic would 
fulfil in a justice which would outgrow these 
institutions ; in a freedom so holy as to need 


REDEMPTION OF LAW FROM ANARCHY. 121 


restrictions, and which the anarchist only re- 
tards. Not the abolition, but the fulfilment, 
of institutions is the way to freedom; and it 
will be the freedom reached through institu- 
tional obedience to the law of sacrifice by which 
Christ made us free. 

It will doubtless be expedient that present 
forms of institutions progressively pass away, 
in order that the government of the world by 
the immediate inspiration of God may increase 
and be fulfilled. But the state itself will not 
pass away, whatever be its form and organiza- 
tion. The nation is immortal, and the peoples 
will never cease to have their national beings 
and organs. The being and glory of the state 
will not cease with its restrictive functions, 
but will rather be increased and fulfilled in 
functions that shall be educative, inspirational, 
and eternal. Political progress will not ascend 
by the way of the destruction of law, but by 
its larger and purer apprehension. The dis- 
tinctions which the literature of Christianity 
makes between law and grace, law and free- 


dom, are mainly distinctions of definition ,; 


I22 THE CHRISTIAN STALE, 


grace is but fuller law, and freedom a better 
obedience. 

The social realization of democracy through 
a Christian state will be the organization of the 
people in obedience to law. And I use the 
term law in its most comprehensive sense. 
Every distinction between the nature of the 
moral law and the nature of the law of the 
state is an evil imagination and a political 
fatuity. There is but one law and one right, 
of which the state is the organ and the edu- 
cator. That order of society which finds its 
‘expression in a secular state which is to or- 
ganize the people in one kind of right, and a 
church of religion which is to discourse upon 
another kind of right, is the constitution of 
human life in essential anarchy. It is the 
order which schools the people to unbelief in 
right, and kills the social life with the letter of 
the statute book. It is the social falsehood 
which logically leads to the social anarchy to 
which our nation has practically come, and 
from which the political realization of Chris- 
tianity will be our redemption. The Christian 


REDEMPTION OF LAW FROM ANARCHY. 123 


state will be the organized law of the people 
in communion with God in the sacrifice of 
Christ. 

The Christian idea of law, which no nation 
has yet embodied in its constitution or in its 
judicial ideals, is the evolution and fulfilment 
of the Hebrew law. To the Hebrew, law was 
an expression of the mind of God concerning 
man. From the beginning of his education the 
Hebrew child was grounded and disciplined in 
the law of the nation, which he was taught to 
regard as an organization of the kingdom of 
God. The study of the law was the education 
of the man in right, and in a saving knowledge 
of the wrong. Law was a medium of commun- 
ion and worship, of obedience and co-operation, 
with God as the true political ruler of the na- 
tion. The functions of law were educational — 
subjective rather than objective in operation. 
The protective and police functions of the law 
were incidental to the education of man in the 
will of God; of the nation in the right of God. 
When prophet, or statesman, or psalmist, ex- 
pressed his delight in the law, it was not to the 


I24 THE CHRISTIAN STA Tes 


written code he referred, but to the quality of 
right suggested by the code. The psalmist 
loved what God willed; he loved the educa- 
tion in that will which he received from the 
law. It was the moral nature of the mind of 
God, which the Hebrew was in a measure 
enabled to understand by the law, that at- 
tracted him to its study as a means of educa- 
tion. Upon the common study of the law as 
the word of God, not merely or mainly upon 
legal executions, did the integrity of the na- 
tion depend. Nowhere has the sacredness of 
human life been so seriously emphasized as in 
the Hebrew law. Yet the emphasis is always 
laid upon the awful subjective effect of the 
sin of murder in the murderer, rather than 
in its objective effect on the murdered. The 
moral lesson to be derived from the Bible story 
of the first murder, when read as it is clearly 
written, is not in the fact that Abel was killed, 
but that Cain killed him. Centuries before the 
Hebrew statutes were transcribed, the right- 
eousness of those statutes had been written in 


the moral nature of man; rather, they were 


REDEMPTION OF LAW FROM ANARCHY. 1 25 


inherent in the constitution of his humanity. 
Not until the nation had nearly completed its 
political history was the transcription of the 
law complete, and that transcription came with 
national decay. It was when the nation lost 
its consciousness of the law as educative rather 
than restrictive, as associative rather than legal, 
that the closest attention was given to the writ- 
ings and decisions of the law. The pure He- 
brew conception was that which regarded the 
law as the school in which the state educated 
and associated the people in the righteousness 
of the kingdom of God. 

The Christian doctrine of law is clearly enun- 
ciated by Paul in his letters to the early 
churches. Law is a schoolmaster whose work 
is the education of men in love; the instru- 
ment which is to prepare men for association 
in the justice of sacrifice. When the apostle 
declares love to be the fulfilling of the law, 
he is not speaking as a sentimentalist, a pietist, 
or a mystic, but as a political philosopher; as 
a social statesman who understands and de- 


fines the educational and associative functions 


126 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


of law. According to his Christian philosophy 
of law, society is the end for which law exists. 
To say that love is the fulfilling of the law is 
simply to declare that the law is fulfilled in 
society. Society is the fulfilment of the law 
because it is the fulfilment of love. Law is the 
divine instrument for the conviction of men in 
the wrong that separates them from each other 
and from God, and their education in the sacri- 
ficial quality of right which has power to associ- 
ate them in the perfect justice of the love which 
God has manifested in Christ. Not individual 
protection, but mutual association, is the end of 
law ; not individual rights, but mutual associa- 
tion in righteousness. Neither Christian apos- 
tle nor Hebrew prophet ever thought that the 
law in itself could make men righteous, or that 
its incident of individual protection was the end 
of law. No mere enforcement of law external 
to a man’s moral nature can make him right or 
social; it can only restrain him from outward 
acts of evil. The chief emphasis upon what 
might be called the legal and police functions 


of the law, rather than its educational and asso- 


MEOEMPTION OF LAW FROM ANARCHY. 127 


ciative functions, has always been the signifi- 
cance of periods of lawlessness and _ political 
dissolution. Law can save itself only by los- 
ing itself ; by being the schoolmaster to bring 
us through faith out of political atheism unto 
Christ, who is the political wisdom and power 
of God unto the social redemption and perfec- 
tion of the nations. When government, which 
is ordained to institute and realize law, sustains 
its true relation to God and the people, it pro- 
gressively discovers, proclaims, and interprets 
the law of Christ’s kingdom of God. 

Probably not since the Roman age into which 
Christ came has such attention been given to 
statute-making and judicial decisions as by our 
nation at this time. Yet in the common mind 
there is scarcely any longer a thought of our 
courts of law as having a relation to social jus- 
tice. The law and its judgments are not now 
the education of the people in right. Our 
courts do not impress the public thought with 
the moral majesty and holy nature of the law. 
Law and justice have come to be separate en- 


tities which may incidentally unite. I do not 


128 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


mean to say that there is no justice in our 
courts, and I doubt not that the purest repre- 
sentatives of our institutions are on the judicial 
bench. Perhaps there is as much conviction 
of judicial sin in the judiciary as among the 
people. But the fact abides and enlarges that 
our courts of law have ceased to be courts 
of justice in the public mind. No legal soph- 
istry can conceal that one’s standing in the 
processes of legal trial and judgment depends 
in large degree upon the material interests 
he represents, and his ability to purchase tech- 
nical skill. Even judicial decisions that are 
strictly according to the law are often so no- 
toriously unjust, when weighed by the social 
conscience, as to inspire a wide and ominous 
distrust of both legislatures and courts. To 
say that an act is legal, and has been so ad- 
judged by the judiciary, no longer necessarily 
means that it is just and right. The fact that 
the skilled exponents of the law in one great 
commonwealth of our nation can find no legal 
method of criminating and punishing the 


former president of a railway corporation for 


Peete TOV OF LAW FROM ANARCHY. 129 


virtually stealing the sum of six million dol- 
lars from its treasury, while the governor of 
another great commonwealth is petitioned to 
pardon from the penitentiary a young man 
under sentence of fourteen years’ imprison- 
ment for the theft of a pair of shoes, and that 
his first crime, suggests the social seriousness 
of the problem of law. The use of the law 
as the instrument of social injustice and in- 
dustrial lawlessness is a form of anarchy from 
which our nation urgently needs redemption. 
A concrete example of how law may be made 
~ the instrument of an industrial anarchy is the. 
flagrant use of our federal courts for what a 
prominent writer has lately defined as the 
“legalized plunder of railway properties.” 
Probably no other instances of the judicial 
administration of our laws have created such 
a profound and perilous unfaith in the com- 
petency of our institutions to procure justice. 
Receivers for railways are appointed by the 
federal courts who are often the men, or 
are appointed in the interests of the men, 
who have themselves bankrupted the _ prop- 


130 THE CHRISTIAN STALE 


erties for personal profit, and who are prac- 
tically irresponsible to either the real owners 
of the property, or to the public affected by 
its management. Through strange legal pro- 
cesses, and the despotic irresponsibility of rail- 
way property and management, appointees of 
the federal courts are now operating nearly 
one-fourth of the railway properties of the 
nation. These properties have been largely 
thrown into the courts through financial 
crimes; through a fearful species of industrial 
anarchy seemingly unaccountable to existing 
laws. And the corporate managers of these 
properties are seeking to compel the public 
to pay such rates of traffic, and their em- 
ployees to work for such wages, as will enable 
the corporations to realize dividends of profit 
on a fictitious capitalization many times the 
amount, In some cases, of the actual capital 
invested. Mr. Van Oss’s book on “ American 
Railroads as Investments,’ the most recent 
and reliable railroad authority, also written in 
the commercial interests of the railways them- 
selves, says that ‘‘for $4,650,000,000 shares 


REDEMPTION OF LAW FROM ANARCHY. 13! 


now in existence, the original investors cer- 
tainly paid not more than $465,000,000, or 
ten per cent of their face value, and probably 
less.’ Without redress or remedy under pres- 
ent laws, or under their interpretation and 
administration, the American people are now 
paying interest on a capital stock amounting 
to billions of dollars which never had a real 
existence. As it is now organized, or rather 
in its present state of disorganization, our 
railway system is a greater menace to the 
integrity and perpetuity of the nation than 
was ever the institution of slavery; it is the 
strongest enemy of society and the chief dan- 
ger of anarchy; and it has become such through 
the manipulation of legislatures and the pro- 
tection of courts. The command and admin- 
istration of the railway system by law is the 
most immediate national problem which de- 
mands our legislative and judicial solution. 
In the unlimited responsibility of the people 
for the protection of railway and other cor- 
porate properties, with the almost absolute 
irresponsibility of these corporations to the 


132 LHE, CHRISTIAN STA 


public, our laws permit what is immeasurably 
more vicious and destructive to liberty than 
taxation without representation. The people 
of our nation will not, and ought not, much 
longer maintain what are practically public 
corporations privately owned, with no respon- 
sibility for the public welfare, no accountability 
to the public will, and virtually not amenable to 
public justice, yet requiring the national courts 
for their operation, and the national army for 
their protection. If the people must be re- 
sponsible for the operation of these proper- 
ties, and their courts and army used for this 
end, while there is no way by which the courts 
and army can be used to protect the people 
from corporate oppression and_ exploitation, 
then the people should not only own and 
operate the properties for which they are 
responsible at such a cost, but should re- 
organize and reconstitute the laws of the 
land in the interests of humanity and of the 
nation, 

The social wrongs and industrial disorder 
attributable to the present conceptions and in- 


REDEMPTION OF LAW FROM ANARCHY. 133 


terpretations of law are not mitigated by the 
fact that the fault largely lies in the enactment 
of the law itself, and in precedent, rather than 
in the judiciary. Even though the evil work- 
ings of the law be legislative rather than judi- 
cial sins in their last analysis, the result is 
none the less the education of the people in 
lawlessness and in social unfaith. And it is 
questionable whether the social disorder which 
our laws are causing instead of curing should 
be attributed to corrupt legislative enactment, 
more than to false judicial interpretation. Law 
is not fixed and mechanical, but vital and evo- 
lutionary. Courts are set to make as well as 
follow precedent. The tyranny of a code, or of 
an unchanging interpretation of law, may be 
more destructive to liberty than the tyranny of 
a despot. The immediate cause of revolution 
may sometimes be found in the persistence of 
precedent as the determining element in the 
interpretation and execution of law. And there 
is no tyranny so subtly degrading to the nation, 
so hurtful to liberty, as a judiciary which per- 
sists in the spirit and precedent of interpreting 


134 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


law in behalf of property, rather than of human 
beings. 

The inordinate and perverted sense of the 
worth of property which our industrial system 
has stimulated and strengthened, making it 
the object of social worship, has naturally sub- 
jected to the property interests of the largest 
owners the well-being of the people in legisla- 
tion. The rule of property has thus usurped 
the rule of the people, and our legislative halls 
have been converted into the lobby-chambers 
in which corrupting corporate interests buy the 
rights of the people from political bureaucra- 
cies, and use the institutions of law for social 
lawlessness. Corporations that are the chief 
beneficiaries of legislation, and that should be 
the organization of the highest justice, use the 
laws of the land to achieve their ends, and 
avail themselves of the law’s extreme protec- 
tion, but are practically a law unto themselves. 
In American legislation of the past decade 
human beings, as compared with property, have 
small place. We have laws that will imprison 


or execute the man who murders his fellow out 


REDEMPTION OF LAW FROM ANARCHY. 135 


of passion for revenge, or for the procurement 
of small gain—though even the laws for the 
execution of the single murderer may be baffled 
according to the political or financial influence 
of the criminal. But for the street and na- 
tional railway corporations that indirectly, yet 
inexcusably, murder thousands for money, we 
have no effective punishments. By what kind 
of a political conscience do we suffer corpora- 
tions to kill their hundreds, through profitable 
neglect or refusal to provide appliances or con- 
structions by which these slaughters of men 
for corporate gain might be avoided? Is it any 
more right for members of a financial corpora- 
tion to indirectly kill their fellows for money, 
than for the individual to kill his fellow for 
private robbery or in passion? The extent to 
which the power of property has become the 
legislative power of the land has its shameful 
and revolutionary manifestation in the arrogant 
and unconcealed influence of a great monopo- 
listic organization in the national legislation of 
the spring and summer of the year 1894. It is 
questionable if anything so disastrous to politi- 


136° THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


cal morals has occurred in the history of our na- 
tion. I know of nothing that has so shaken the 
popular faith in the efficacy of our legislative in- 
stitutions. Against these legislators — scarcely 
knowing so much as that there is a social ques- 
tion, insulted by proposals that they shall give 
direct attention to the industrial condition and 
social well-being of the whole people, yet 
thinking it political wisdom to indirectly tax 
the whole people according to the dictation of 
the few who already control capital, industry, 
and legislation — there is laid up a divine polit- 
ical judgment, in which they may well call on 
the mountains and hills to cover-the shame of 
their moral crimes against the nation. : 
It was against the approach of the legislative 
despotism of property, in the form of capital, 
that President Lincoln raised “ a warning voice” 
in a message to the Thirty-seventh Congress: 
“There is one point with its connections, not 
so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a 
brief attention. It is the effort to place capital 
on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in 


the structure of government. It is assumed 


REDEMPTION OF LAW FROM ANARCHY. 137 


that labor is available only in connection with 
capital, that nobody labors unless somebody 
else owning capital, somehow, by the use of it, 
induces him to labor.’ Continuing, Mr. Lin- 


coln proposed this principle: ‘‘ Labor is prior 


to and independent of capital. Capital is only 


the fruit of labor, and never could have existed 
if labor had not first existed. Labor is the su- 
perior of capital, and deserves much the higher 
consideration.” In the same message, this 
greatest political leader the common peoples 
of the earth have ever had, being also the most 
far-seeing of modern political prophets save 
Mazzini, bids ‘those who toil” to ‘ beware 
of surrendering a political power which they 
already possess, and which, if surrendered, will 
_ surely be used to close the door of advancement 
against such as they, and to fix new disabilities 
and burdens upon them till all of liberty shall 
be lost.””. And much of liberty has been lost, 
and great property despotisms built up, since 
_ Abraham Lincoln spoke this unheeded warning 
to the nation for which both his life and death 


were a divine sacrifice. 


138 LHE CHRISTIAN STAGE 


But the national shame and portent of this 
loss of political and industrial liberty is the 
method by which it has come. The law which 
was instituted to protect and perfect our liber- 
ties has become the instrument of their perver- 
sion and peril. It is through the evil mysteries 
of legislation and the unjust workings of the 
law that our nation has reached its present 
social confusion and _ political degradation. 
Through the enactment and administration of 
the law itself the people have received their 
education in lawlessness and social injustice. 
_ The processes of law, during recent years, have 
been the schoolmaster to bring the people into 
political infidelity, that they might be destroyed 
through social unbelief. Instead of associating 
the people in obedience to laws that increas- 
ingly apprehend and institute the law of the 
kingdom of God, the methods of our laws have 
been training men to do that which is socially 
right in the eyes of their own selfish interests. 

We have thus become the most lawless and 
socially destructive of civilized peoples, and 


have become so through the instrumentality of 


REDEMPTION OF LAW FROM ANARCHY. 139 


purely secular and individual conceptions of 
law. We are not in a sense yet violent; but 
one does not need to throw dynamite bombs to 
be a destroyer of society and an anarchist in 
fact ; he need only be a law unto himself. The 
open violation of the interstate commerce law 
by railway management is anarchy. The use 
of our legislative institutions for corporate pri- 
vate interests is a national anarchy of fearful 
character and danger. The social anarchy of 
our system of unrestricted competition is being 
manifested in the demoralization and disorgan- 
ization of commercial and industrial interests 
we everywhere find. While all nations are full 
of a dread of anarchy, our nation is in a state 
of anarchy that is no less real in that it is in- 
dustrial. Our anarchists are among the politi- 
cally cunning and unscrupulous, the socially 
strong and industrially powerful, the victorious 
competitors and spoilers of the people’s sub- 
stance; and the law itself is their instrument 
of anarchy. 

This anarchy is the natural, retributive, and 


remedial outcome of our blind and unheeding 


140 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


social worship of material things and forces — 
a worship always degrading, divisive, and de- 
structive to both individual and associated hu- 
man life. Our social troubles are largely due 
to our exalting property to the place and rever- 
ence that belong to human beings in the enact- 
ment and administration of law. Strangely 
enough, some of the fundamental theories of 
the atheistic politics of France prior to the 
French Revolution have increasingly dominated 
the formation and execution of our laws through 
the century. One of these is the commercial 
and materialistic theory that government exists 
for the protection of property— our modern 
political Baal worship. ‘The conception is de- 
structive to the moral life and social freedom 
in its logical effect. With property as the chief 
concern of government, the utter degradation 
of law and political demoralization of the peo- 
ple are inevitable, and tyranny and slavery are 
sure. This was the unconscious thought of a 
recent address to the people of Chicago by the 
venerable Judge Lyman Trumbull, whose polit- 


ical character and legal wisdom are worthy of 


BeOLMPTION OF LAW FROM ANARCHY. I4!1 


the most thoughtful consideration. ‘The ex- 
isting conflict between labor and capital,” he 
says, ‘‘has its foundation in unjust laws, ena- 
bling the few to accumulate vast estates and 
live in luxurious ease, while the great masses 
are doomed to incessant toil, penury, and want. 


What is needed is the removal of the cause 


which permits the accumulation of the wealth i 


of the country in a few hands, and this ¢an 
only be brought peaceably about by a change 
of the laws of property.” The protection of 
property is but the incident and not the end of 
government ; and our laws of property must be 
changed, as Judge Trumbull suggests, with ref- 
erence to the social being of the whole people, 
—with reference to the welfare of all indivi- 
duals, and not a privileged few. The protection 
of property is but incidental in law and govern- 
ment to the development and perfection of 
man. «Law was not made for property, but 
both property and law were made for the moral 
and social education of human life. The nation 
that saveth its property shall lose it; and the 
nation that loseth its property, for the sake of 


142 THE CHRISTIAN STALE. 


the social justice of Christ’s kingdom of God, 
shall find its property possessing an eternal 
worth and a spiritual glory. It is not really 
property we want so much as we socially and 
legislatively think, but home and freedom, jus- 
tice and society. It is a testimony to the wis- 
dom of Jesus concerning man’s relation to 
property, that in converting our laws from the 
social saving and moral increase of men and 
women to the individual saving and national 
increase of property, our nation now beholds 
the opportunity for private property practically 
-abolished by self-constituted corporate govern- 
ments and industrial despotisms. Judge Trum- 
bull also said that ‘the suppression of the 
recent strikes by the governmental forces has 
aggravated rather than alleviated the discontent 
of the laboring classes.” Social justice through 
a regenerated law is the sole defence that will 
now preserve and develop our national life ; and 
the preparation of this defence should be made 
with the divinest speed and wisdom which the 
inspiration of the political and social service of 


Christ can give. 


REDEMPTION OF LAW FROM ANARCHY. 143 


But our social worship of material forces, 
and the consequent degradation of law and the 
people, are the fruit of the Anglo-Saxon con- 
ception of law as existing for the procurement 
and protection of individual rights, rather than 
for the socialization of .men in justice. The 
insistence upon individual rights rather than 
upon social duties has naturally turned the at- 
tention of every man to things that are his 
own, rather than to the things of others. Out 
of the perverted and individualistic idea of 
rights has grown the inordinate sense of the 
worth of property as the ground upon which 
rights may best stand and defend themselves 
against encroachment. With property the 
ground of rights, of course the more property 
one has the larger the area and force of his 
rights. The stress laid upon the individual 
rather than the social nature of rights has cul- 
tivated for one’s own rights a jealousy so re- 
gardless of the rights of others, that out of the 
passion for rights has evolved the most crush- 
ing and irresponsible social tyranny. 


In the extreme and competitive sense in 


144 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


which individual rights are now interpreted, 
government does not exist for the protection 
of the individual; and the government that 
makes this the end of its existence is the one 
that least of all gives rights and protection to 
the individual commensurate with his social 
possibilities. The protection of the individual 
is incidental, both in cause and effect, to asso- 
ciation in justice. Except through association, 
there is no adequate individual protection, and 
no freedom that is real or enduring. The 
Anglo-Saxon idea of law and government as 
existing for the protection of the individual is 
an advance upon the Roman idea of the indi- 
vidual as existing for the state. But because 
it is an advance, it is therefore all the more 
capable of becoming the instrument of tyranny 
and the cause of anarchy. If our nation is to 
be saved, and civilization be regenerated, the 
Hebrew and Roman and Anglo-Saxon concep- 
tions of law must all three be fulfilled in the 
Christian and universal conception of law as 
existing for the association of men in righteous- 


ness. The end of law is the redemption, asso- 


REDEMPTION OF LAW FROM ANARCHY. 145 


ciation, and perfection of man, and through 
these come the true individual protection and 
freedom. Law negatively fulfils itself in hold- 
ing the forces of evil in abeyance, while posi- 
tively fulfilling itself in the association of men 
in the justice procured through the divine so- 
cialism of organized sacrifice. This is the final 
government of the world symbolized in the 
throne of the Lamb slain from the foundation 
of the world. By the symbol of the throne and 
the Lamb ruling the nations is meant the or- 
ganization of all life, and the institution of all 
laws, under the uniting law of love which has 
its perfect expression in the sacrifice of Christ. 
Not only must law, in order to save and perfect 
society, be protective and become loving, but 
love must become law, and all the statutes of 
the state and judgments of the courts redemp- 
tive interpretations and applications of the law 
of love. The state will thus become not merely 
or mainly an institution of rights, but an insti- 
tution of association, and an institutional mani- 
festation of Christ. The courts of law will 


thus become institutions for applying Christ’s « 


146 THE CHRISTIAN STATE, 


law of sacrifice to the social redemption of the 
world. 

By its ability to socialize men in a common 
service for the good of all, must every law be 
judged. The idea of law as instituted to pro- 
cure an equal balancing of competing self-inter- 
ests is the negation of the end for which law 
exists; the surrender of the one function to 
which all other functions of law are incidental. 
A competitive civilization is the social antonym 
of law. 

There must be given to our institutions a 
regenerating knowledge of the social nature 
and redemptive mission of law. The redemp- 
tion of our nation will come through the prep- 
aration of the way of the justice of Christ 
amidst legal injustice and disorder. That re- 
demption will not come through the abolition 
or destruction of the institutions of law, but 
through their salvation from being the instru- 
ments of legalized anarchy, and their sanctifi- 
cation to realizing among the people the law 
and order which God has revealed in Christ. 
For, thanks be to the God of the fathers of 


REDEMPTION OF LAW FROM ANARCHY. 147 


our nation, who built deeper and more pro- 
phetic foundations than they knew, we have 
constitutional means for redeeming our laws 
from the social disorder of a destructive indt- 
vidualistic legalism, from the political degra- 
dation of a property servitude, into the order 
and glory of the divine social democracy which 
the appearing Christ is inspiring as the hope 
of civilization. 

It is this present appearing and judgment 
of Christ that have compelled me to speak in 
unsparing condemnation of our legislative, eco- 
nomic, and judicial evils, yet with no sense 
of discouragement on my own part, or fear 
of final failure on the part of the people of 
this nation, through whatever tribulation we 
may have to follow our national destiny. If 
I cry repentance to our institutions and the 
people, it is not as the real pessimist who be- 
lieves the existing order of things should be 
let alone, but as the optimist who believes a 
better order to be at hand. In the coming 
of Christ as our Judge and Deliverer we have 
the sure ground and glad motive for repentance 


148 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


from social and political wrong. The social 
judgment of our nation in the righteousness 
of the appearing Christ is our hope of a true 
national glory —for judgment is redemption, 
and law is the realization of righteousness. 


As 


THE CHRISTIAN STATE 


THE 


SALVATION OF THE CHURCH. 


INDIFFERENCE, inertia, a naturally yielding disposition, and, 
above all, fear, paralyzing fear—these are the causes which 
blunt or corrupt the weak conscience of the many, who wander 
hither and thither without any governing rule of conduct, cry- 
ing, Peace, peace, when there is no peace possible. They fear 
fatigue; they fear the struggle; they fear everything but that 
which is really fearful. I tell you that there is an eye whose 
glance descends like a curse from on high upon these men of 
little faith. Wherefore think they they were born? God has 
not placed man on earth as in his final dwelling, to waste his 
days in the slumber of indolence. Time passes them by, not 
like the light zephyr that caresses and refreshes the brow, but 
like the wind that now burns, now freezes; a tempest that 
drives their frail bark among arid rocks, beneath a stormy sky, 
Let them arise and watch—seize the oars, and bedew their 
brows with sweat. Man must do violence to his own nature, 
and bend his will before that immutable order of things which 
encompasses him above, below, in grief and misfortune. <A 
duty, an absolute duty, governs him from the cradle upwards ; 
growing with his growth, and accompanying him to the tomb; 
a duty towards his brothers, as well as to himself; a duty 
towards his country, towards humanity, and above all, towards 
the church; the church, which, rightly understood, is but the 
home of the universal family; the great city wherein dwells 
Christ, at once Priest, King, and Ruler of the world; calling 
upon the free, in every portion of the universe, to unite beneath 
the eternal law of intellect and love. — Lamennais. 


WE 


Seek SLIAN STATE THE SAL- 
PmatON OF THE CHURCH. 


THE power of a political faith in Christ, ris- 
ing amidst the whole political and religious 
people as one person, is needed for the salva- 
tion of the church as well as of the nation. 
The attitude of the church as a whole toward 
the Christian problems of our national life is 
far from what God and the people have a right 
to expect. Not only is the church in a large 
degree indifferent and ignorant concerning the 
nature and real gravity of the social crisis, but 
its official classes are often found in unthink- 
ing and dangerous antagonism to the social 
change which is as surely coming from God 
as the Christ himself. The social infidelity of 
unbelief in the need, wisdom, and power of 
Christ’s kind of righteousness among men 

151 


152 THE CHRISTIAN STALIZAs 


seems to be deeper and more abiding within 
than without the institutions of religion that 
profess Christ as Lord; nowhere else is there 
such an apparent want of faith in the practi- 
cability of Christ’s teachings, in the divine in- 
tention that his commands should be obeyed. 
However politically fallen we be as a people, 
I know of nothing in our politics more perilous 
to the nation, no social ailment more serious, 
than this practical unfaith of the church in the 
righteousness of Christ — an unfaith cultivated 
in the interests of theology, ecclesiasticism, and 
the social worship of property. Though this 
religious cultivation of unfaith be unconscious 
rather than deliberate, it is none the less a 
betrayal of Christ and an apostasy of the 
church. That God’s people do not know the 
difference between religious observances and 
faith, that they will not consider political right 
in distinction from political wrong, that they 
persist in the sin of ignorance concerning the 
social condition of the nation, that they refuse 
to be morally intelligent and reasonable, is no 


less a national treason and ground of complaint 


Pere ALVALTION OF THE CHURCH. 153 


in the church of America than it was in the 
Hebrew church of Isaiah’s time. The church 
as well as the nation must be born again, if 
either is to see the realization of the kingdom 
of God. The repentance of the church, and its 
conversion to a larger faith in Christ, is a polit- 
ical reform of immediate need, and may prove a 
first fruit of the Christian state. 

It is true that exceptional churches are mak- 
ing noble and strenuous efforts to solve spe- 
cific social problems of religion. But these do 
not represent the organized Christianity of the 
present, and are no atonement for the failure 
of institutional Christianity to be the social 
and national representative of Christ. While 
the church is guilty of the wicked folly of fan- 
cying that the building of many and great 
churches, the lengthening of church rolls, is 
the getting of Christianity into the world, the 
multitudes are as sheep without social shep- 
herds, devoured by ravenous political and in- 
dustrial wolves. They are sick and outraged 
with the weak social maxims and religious re- 
spectabilities of the churches — churches which 


154 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


know not their own need of repentance, and 
are acting without the illumination and power 
of the Spirit of the Christ who regenerates and 
socializes. They know well and sadly that, 
devoutly and sincerely as it is intended, much 
of what is taught in pulpits as Christianity is 
something less than the teachings of Jesus re- 
garding human life and relations. The church, 
related as it is to industrial unrighteousness, 
hesitates to reveal the true Jesus whom the 
unchurched and unsocialized peoples are asking 
Locsce: 

Both within and without the church, there is 
a deepening social feeling that Jesus is not ade- 
quately represented by the commanding insti- 
tutions that bear his name. These institutions 
stand for religion, but not for Christ’s kind 
of righteousness; they stand for respectability 
and property, but not for Christ’s law of sacri- 
fice and association; they stand for benevo- 
lence, but not for the justice of the kingdom of 
God. I know of no more earnest and sincerely 
anxious arraignment of the present social at- 
titude of the church than that of a letter pub- 


THE SALVATION OF THE CHURCH. 155 


lished by Mr. Ernest H. Crosby, in the Wezw 
York flerald of Dec. 11, 1894. In this letter 
Mr. Crosby, himself a conservative Christian, 
says: ‘The disclosures made yesterday before 
the Tenement House Commission concerning 
the management by Trinity Church of its ten- 
ement houses are exceedingly discouraging to 
those who, like myself, believe that the words 
of Christ contain the solution of all our social 
difficulties. That the so-called church of Christ 
should not only be blind to the great problems 
which perplex society, but should even be tak- 
ing an active and official part in grinding the 
faces of the poor, cannot but be astounding to 
those who are acquainted with its charter as 
set forth in the four Gospels. The fact is, that 
the true effort to establish the kingdom of 
heaven is almost entirely to be found outside 
the limits of church work. Just as fifty years 
ago those who were awake to the sin of chat- 
tel slavery were denounced as infidels by the 
churches, so to-day the man who perceives the 
injustice of our social system, and especially 


the curse of landlordism in our cities, is looked 


156 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


at askance. Those noble clergymen who are 
in earnest in their attempts to make the world 
better are objects of suspicion; and while the 
mass of their colleagues are engaged in the old 
work of passing by on the other side, we find 
that the priests and Levites of Trinity parish 
are actually employed, at least indirectly, in 
waylaying the unfortunate traveller. So far is 
it from being the same thing to be a disciple of 
Christ and a member of the church, that it is 
not always easy to combine the two characters. 
Even the mad anarchist has some idea of the 
wants of society, and in his perverted manner 
seeks to make way for a better era; but the 
churches for the most part are content to jog 
along in a fool’s paradise of their own.” 
Whatever be the measure of our agreement or 
disagreement with Mr. Crosby’s arraignment, 
only the blind leaders of the blind will deny 
that the church is failing to stand in the great 
chasm, daily widening and deepening because 
of the church’s failure, between the hostile 
social forces that are filling civilization with 


strain and dread. 


Pee WALVATION OF THE CHURCH. 157 


Now, there is a certain seeking to save and 
build itself up first, resulting in a seeking 
of the righteousness of the kingdom of God 
subordinately, that 1s mainly the cause of the 
church’s failure. The church is losing its true 
authority in a worldly jealousy to save for it- 
self a purely arbitrary authority to which it has 
no right; it is deceiving both itself and the 
people with the complacency and unconscious 
religious arrogance of institutional selfishness. 
The divine life of the church is being eaten up 
by the unholy zeal of its official classes, who 
make the church an end in itself, and mistake 
the numerical and financial increase of the 
church for an increase of Christianity and the 
kingdom of God. Out of selfish consideration 
for its interests the church has taught religious- 
ness more than an actual righteousness, and has 
separated itself from the great world conflicts 
amidst which it ought to be the solving factor. 
This making of the church an end instead of a 
means of religion, so far as man’s relations with 
the world in which he lives are concerned, is 
the essential apostasy of the church from its 


true faith and mission. 


158 THE CHRISTIAN STATE, 


This apostasy hedges the institutions of the 
church about with a fictitious sacredness, and 
the officials of religion with an unreal holiness, 
separating the work and people of the world 
into one class, and the church and officials of 
religion into another. But it was for just 
the opposite of this the church was appointed. 
It was not sent to build up an institution of 
religion that should be more holy than the 
world, but to permeate and possess all the 
world, the world’s people and institutions and 
machinery, with the holiness of Christ. The 
moment we look upon the offices or institu- 
tions of religion as being peculiarly holy, in- 
herently and naturally holier than the ordinary 
functions of life, then instead of making the 
church truly holy, we have degraded its offices 
and made them a blasphemy of the life of God 
in the people. When we lift any idea of 
sanctity from the common life, and add an 
idea of peculiar sanctity to the offices of re- 
ligion, we make the church a barrier between 
God and the people, and make the officer of 


religion a living lie to the people about God. 


$7 DALVALTION OF THE CHURCH. 159 


Every conception that the ministry and offices 
of religion have an inherent sacredness attach- 
ing not to other work of the world is a profana- 
tion of human life and an apostasy of religion. 
To the measure that the church appears before 
the people demanding a regard for itself that it 
conceives does not belong to every occupation 
and organization of man, it appears under false 
pretences, and becomes a minister of practical 
atheism, responsible for political iniquity and 
commercial fraud; for the social unrighteous- 
ness of secularism, and the tyrannies and 
wrongs of our industrial order. The church 
is not any more sacred in the divine thought 
than the mill and the market. And when the 
mill and the market are places where men are 
oppressed, they are no worse than the church 
that is a centre and congestion of religious 
selfishness. It was not the sin of the street, 
but this religious selfishness in the Jewish 
church, that crucified Jesus as a blasphemer 
and destroyer. 

But the chief and more fatal sin of the 


church is the failure of its pulpit to possess and 


160 THE CHRISTIAN Sia 


be possessed by a living inspiration. Not only 
is the church as a whole without an open vision, 
but it has come to be an actual offence, a kind 
of a heresy, to have an original inspiration from 
God for one’s own time and its problems. The 
very incredulity with which the idea of a living 
inspiration is regarded, no more by the secular- 
ism of the market and the Sadduceeism of poli- 
tics than by the officialism of the church, is one 
of the signs of the degradation of faith. We 
who ought to be the messengers of God to 
the living people are mainly occupied in dedu- 
cing religious lessons from the inspirations and 
messages to a people centuries dead. I do 
not mean that all messages of God are not 


x, and that we 


oD?) 


for all times and always livin 
ought not to search the Scriptures for the 
manner and messages by which God spoke to 
the past. But when we try to make the mes- 
sages of God to a dead people take the place 
of the messages of God to a living people, we 
are the embezzlers of spiritual funds, and have 
caused the Bible to separate the people from 
God. When we discourse upon the inspired 


THE SALVATION OF THE CHURCH. 161 


messages of God to other men, without direct 
communications, original inspirations, timely 
messages, of our own to bear to the people, 
we misrepresent God. 

This want of an inspiration from God to our 
own and needful living time is the real cause 
of the distrust and mockery of the church by 
the unchurched multitudes, though they have 
no ability to define the cause. The men in the 
pulpits are good men, the best in a sense the 
world has, but conventional and uninspired, 
without the direct communication from God 
which every preacher should bring to the peo- 
ple. Virtue does not go out of us because our 
virtues are traditional and reputable rather than 
vital and inspirational. It is thus easy to com- 
prehend why the majority of the people do not 
go to the preaching and teaching of the church 
to learn right from wrong; why, indeed, many 
constant and devout worshippers in the church 
are there because they are getting something 
else than a knowledge of right from wrong for 
their spiritual comfort. The wonder is not 
that so few, but that so many, actoally attend 


162 THE CHRISTIAN STATS 


the religious performances of the church that 
knows not what God is thinking and saying 
concerning the living needs and problems that 
cry to the pulpit for knowledge. 

I do not wish to mix with any controversies 
about theories of inspiration. But certainly we 
must all know that our work is with the God 
of the living rather than with a God of the 
dead. The divinely authorized preacher is sim- 
ply the bearer of direct messages from the liv- 
ing God to the living people; the instrument 
through whom God communicates fresh and 
vitally new inspiration to his world. It is only 
a living and original inspiration from God to 
one’s own time and crises that authorizes any 
man to preach. It is an awful spiritual crime 
for the preacher to come uninspired before his 
people; for in so doing he is a bearer of false 
pretences instead of a message-bearer of God. 
Whoever goes without an original message, a 
direct communication, a living inspiration, is a 
spiritual fraud. However devout and religious 
we may be, though soever correct in opinion 
and faultless in conduct, if we are simply 


Sees ALV ATION OF THE CHURCH. 163 


finding lessons in what God said to a people 
now dead, and are not in such relations with 
God that he can express his thought and will 
through us to the living, we are practically 
without faith, and pretend to a spiritual author- 
ity we do not possess. Vital and always new 
as the messages of God to a past age are, we 
may never be so atheistic in fact as when we 
are most diligently searching and teaching the 
Scriptures, and that with highly religious mo- 
tives; never so destructive to true faith in the 
living God. 

It is surely a strange kind of protection, a 
sad quality of faith, which so hedges in with 
theories of inspiration the Scripture records of 
past revelations as to make them a barrier and 
a threat against living inspirations and revela- 
tions from God to the living men of the pres- 
ent. Is it likely that God was any more 
interested in the politics of the Hebrews than 
he is in the politics of Americans? Is it 
reasonable to suppose that God was more con- 
cerned with the Jewish church than he is with 
the American church? Does it reflect wisely 


164 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


on either the sovereignty or the character of 
God to assume that he was willing and able to 
help past times and crises with direct commu- 
nications, and yet is unable and unwilling to 
communicate directly with this neediest and 
most critical time of history ? Do we suppose 
that God has so exhausted his power as the 
Father of men that this human age of divin- 
est opportunity must depend wholly on the 
opportune messages of God to other ages, and 
work out its fearful problems in an uncertain 
salvation —as though God had withdrawn 
himself from the world, or were not able to 
speak, or were dead? 

The one vehement and insistent complaint 
which the Hebrew prophets lifted against their 
nation was the refusal of the people, with their 
religious and political leaders, to be inspired by 
the God of the living; they were always wor- 
shipping the God of the dead — worshipping 
traditionally and ceremonially, professionally 
and arbitrarily. It was this sin that made the 
Jewish church blind to the revelation of God 


in Christ, and the persecutor of those who saw 


THE SALVATION OF THE CHURCH. 165 


that revelation. It was this sin that made the 
Catholic church blind to the revelation of God 
in the Reformation, and the persecutor of the 
reformers and evangelists who saw that reve- 
lation and proclaimed it abroad. It is this 
sin which most mortally besets the Protestant 
church of to-day. Can it be that the church of 
the Reformation will repeat the experience of 
this sad religious past; that Prostestantism in 
its turn will persecute those who behold the 
social revelation of God in Christ, and receive 
and declare the living inspiration of that 
revelation ? 

The present manifestation of Christ in the 
world is full of hope for the future of the 
church; full of light upon the future course 
of the Christian peoples in the church, how- 
ever obstinate and selfish merely theological 
and official religion may prove. The social 
movement has been a conviction of sin anda 
revelation of Christ to the church, within which 
are multitudes of eager disciples who only 
need to know Christ’s truth to obey it unto 
death. There is an awful heartache within ten 


166 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


thousand of the church’s baffled and troubled 
ministers, who know not what to do and are 
crying out to know, while a million Christian 
disciples in the churches are in sorrow because 
there is something lacking in themselves and 
their ministers, which they know not how to 
supply, not knowing even what the lack is; and 
all this is because ministers and churches come 
not together in the communion, the frankness, 
the honesty of the Spirit. But in the midst 
of the church’s social unfaith and perplexity 
is the risen and appearing Lord Christ, who is 
the quickening Spirit of our dead religious for- 
malities, entreating the church to turn from its 
apostasy to him and receive the Holy Ghost. 
The church can find no extrication from the 
social guilt and sorrow, and receive no spiritual 
leadership of the social forces, save through ac- 
knowledging its guilt and turning from its sin 
— working out the social redemption with fear 
and trembling, perhaps through purgatorial fire 
and suffering, which is none other than the fire 
of the Holy Ghost. We cannot cast the rich 


men from the churches they have disgraced in 


fey ATION OF THE CHURCH. 167 


the eyes of God’s people; for their sin is the 
church’s sin, and the church has made them 
what they are. The church can neither escape 
the law of retribution which purifies, nor the 
law of vicariousness by which it must guide 
society through the social retribution and re- 
demption. But the national social pain may 
become a matchless and glorious shame to the 
church, if it will face its participation in the 
social wrong, and surrender to the spirit and 
agony of the social regeneration. The power 
of God may rest upon the church of to-day in 
such a measure as it has never rested upon as- 
sociated men, if the church will glory in its in- 
firmity, and understand its need of a changed 
social heart. If those who love and wait the 
appearing of the Lord Christ, the divinely anx- 
ious and watchful in the churches of America, 
would assemble for prayer, in one accord to do 
the will of Christ — humbly discovering and 
deeply considering what Christ taught concern- 
ing human relations, and waiting for a Pente- 
cost of power to obey —and would then go 


before the nation with the social program of | 


168 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


Christ, the breath of God like a mighty rushing 
wind would give political healing to the nation, 
conscience and unity to the church, and regen- 
eration to society. 

The political realization of Christianity will 
issue in the divine establishment of the church 
in the state. The functions of church and 
state will become so related, as society becomes 
more Christianly organized, that their union 
will be naturally accomplished by spiritual 
forces through moral processes. I have no 
plan to offer for the union of church and state, 
and we need no plan; the problem of their 
union is one which God will unfold as man ful- 
fils the righteousness of Christ. But we can 
make no greater mistake than to suppose that 
the separation of church and state is the final 
solution of the problem of their relations. If 
religion is life, then politics is hfe; and the or- 
ganization of the two must be one. The dis- 
union of church and state, the separation of 
politics from religion, is largely the sin of the 
church itself. If it had sought to make the 


person and mind of Christ the centre of unity, 


fer eALVALTION OF THE CHURCH. 169 


instead of its own institutions of religion, it 
would not have proved itself so often the foe 
of the people’s liberties, and the friend of their 
tyrants ; it would not have proved itself, in 
great crises, unworthy of the people’s trust, 
and the source of religious and political anar- 
chies. And so long as the church remains 
what it now is, there ought not to be a unity 
of the church with the state. If we cannot 
trust such politics as we have to organize the 
religion of the people, we can none the better 
trust such religion as we have to organize the 
politics of the people. The church of religion 
must become Christian as well as the political 
state, in order to fulfil the divine unity of the 
two in the Christian organization of society. 

The union of church and state is not some- 
thing the church should seek at all, but is 
a triumphant and glorious thing that will be 
added to it through a faithful seeking to ful- 
fil the righteousness of the kingdom of God in 
the world. The vital and abiding union will 
not be reached through a plan, but through 


the uniting spirit that seeks the social justice 


170 THE CHRISTIAN Si aie 


of the kingdom with a passion so holy that 
it consumes all jealousies and rivalries of 
parties, sects, and opinions. The Christian 
church of the Christian state will not come 
through the adoption of methods, through re- 
visions and reconciliations of creeds, through 
the balancing of interests and opinions, through 
ecclesiastical legislation, but through the im- 
mersion of men in the Christ Spirit, and the 
fusion of all interests, opinions, and polities in 
the one common purpose to fulfil the society 
of the kingdom of Christ’s righteousness on 
‘the earth. Only the accordance of men in 
the mind of Christ, and their consequent im- 
mersion in his passion for right, so that they 
shall be one as the Father and Son are one, 
can discover that unity of church and state 
which shall bring forth the Messianic nation 
for the social redemption and unity of the 
world. 

The church that shall fulfil this unity, and 
speak with a true spiritual authority to the 
responsive political faith of the people, will 


be a redeemed and holy church, not living to 


See VATION OF THE CHURCH. 171 


build up itself out of the world, but to divinely 
build the world in righteousness out of its own 
Srcuince on Christ's behalf; a church not en- 
dued with pride and fear, silent before social 
crimes, and justifying the legal robberies com- 
mitted by the religious, -but a church proclaim- 
ing release to the social captives, and setting at 
liberty them that are bruised by oppression; a 
church whose iniquity has been purged and 
pardoned, its warfare with its own selfishness, 
unfaith, and apostasy accomplished, and con- 
verted into the organized passion and sacrifice 
of Jesus for the deliverance of the sons of men, 
who are also the sons of God; a church not 
reformed, or restored, or merely organically 
united, but a church regenerated throughout, 
and fulfilling in itself the quality of life that 
opened the heavens of truth for the descent 
of the pure and perfect authority of love upon 
the Christ ; a church to which the witnesses of 
Christ can at last — would God the time were 
now!—speak comfortably, without breaking 
faith with their Lord. 

The church is not occupying its true place 


172 THE CHRISTIAN “STAg ie 


among men and institutions—the place of 
world government and unity, the place as- 
sisned to it in the counsels of ))G@ogaaeene 
divine supremacy which it can reach only 
through the sacrifice of world service, and by 
the highway of holiness. The hope of spir- 
itually authorized government, of divinely pro- 
cured unity, through the Roman church, is 
extinct —though the form and many elements 
of unity therein remain. Protestantism has 
given, indeed is giving, no hope or promise 
of a new unity—vyea, has practically aban- 
doned to secularism, political atheism, and 
social infidelity the right and kingship of the 
Christ to rule the nations. If there were 
nothing for the church beyond Protestantism, 
as we now see it, then the church would be 
a decadent institution, and Christianity would 
have to find another universal organ. The 
horrid blasphemy, the religious anarchy, the 
social selfishness, the theological wickedness, 
of this divided Protestantism, affronts every 
sense of sacrifice and order which man has re- 
ceived from God, presenting, indeed, a fearful 


meee wALVvATION OF THE CHURCH. 173 


rending of the body of Christ. The conver- 
sion of the Roman church to Christ is in some 
senses a no less hopeful prospect than the 
conversion of Protestantism. But whether 
through a revived and regenerated Catholic 
church, — no longer Roman, but Christian and 
catholic indeed,—or whether through a de- 
faulting Protestant liberty transmuted into di- 
vine order and unity, there will be a new 
and redeemed church. What the form of that 
church will be we do not know —it doth not 
yet appear. But we may know that it is com- 
ing, perhaps through great tribulation — per- 
haps the old church made new in the blood of 
the Lamb, regenerated through a new baptism 
in the sacrifice of God, — but coming to fill the 
earth with moral glory immortal, joy unspeak- 
able, hope eternal. We should repent, there- 
fore, and prepare the way of the Lord; for 
though what the church will be does not yet 
appear, we know that when it does appear, it 
shall be like him whose name it bears, and 
whose judgment is our hope. 

I believe in the holy catholic church. The 


174 THE CHRISTIAN STALE 


dream of the federation of the nations in the 
holy universal church will yet be realized, when 
the church becomes worthy of the trust of the 
nations. The union of the nations in a Chris- 
tian world empire will yet be accomplished in 
the church —a holy imperial church, without 
spot or blemish; a church which shall be the 
visible manifestation of the invisible govern- 
ment of God. Though the church of the 
fathers turned from the glory of the righteous- 
ness of Christ to the darkness and meanness 
of heathen metaphysical speculation, though 
the church of Rome usurped the place of Christ 
in the Christian empire, though the church of 
the Reformation failed of its mission because 
of the selfishness and divisiveness of theological 
strife, the regenerated church of the fulfilment 
will be the world organ of the Christianity that 
is surely revealing and organizing all human 
life. Even now the way opens for the church 
to move forward to the occupancy of its true 
position of throneship in the social organism — 
the position which it does not now occupy, and 
has fallen short of in the past, but will occupy 


feeewale ATION OF THE CHORCH. 175 


in the day of its regeneration. The church of 
to-day has it in its power to unofficially solve 
the problem of society in all nations, and it 
ought. It need wait for no national decrees 
to grasp and order the social future. It need 
tarry for no civil adjustments of the relations 
of church and state to morally rule the world ; 
for the divine and continuing union of church 
and state will be a result and not a cause of the 
church’s spiritual reign in the affairs of human 
government. It need delay for no trifling defi- 
nitions and idle distinctions between the visible 
and invisible church —distinctions by which 
we would deceive our consciences, and evade 
the true and righteous judgments of God; it is 


a visible church that is our responsibility, 





a 
church to be called to repentance and the fire 
of the Holy Ghost, to sacrifice and sovereignty ; 
and we cannot escape our responsibility by 
comforting ourselves with deceitfully precious 
definitions. The people will accept the author- 
ity and freedom of a church that is in truth the 
throne of the Lamb—the centre from which 


Christ shall govern the world through his law 


176 - THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


of sacrifice. The Christian revival of our na- 
tion will be a step in the preparation of the 
world for the divine absolutism of love that 
shall issue eternally from the holy imperial 
church, adorned at last in white righteousness, 
to be the bride of the Lamb through whom God 
shall reign forever. Even so, be thou speedily 
coming, Lord Jesus. 


WAL 


THE CHRISTIAN REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 


Now it is the firm hold of these great realities of the king- 
dom, present to faith though far from sight, and the dauntless 
preaching of them with conviction and fervor, that is going to 
bring revivals of religion of a different sort from those which 
have been common here — revivals like those by which John 
the Baptist prepared the way of the kingdom, and Savanarola, 
four hundred years ago, revolutionized Florence. The fruits of 
these revivals will be found, not merely or mainly in lengthen- 
ing church rolls, and more people at the prayer-meeting, but in 
the good-will that takes the place of strife in mill and factory; 
in the heroic and consecrated service of humanity that sup- 
plants our lazy and aimless almsgiving; and in the new ideals 
of public life that will banish the boss and the corruptionist 
from politics, and make the city hall the citadel of righteous- 
ness. 

Revivals of religion like these are what the weary world is 
waiting for. Not until religion is manifested as the power that 
is able thus to subdue the kingdom of this world, will it com- 
mand the respectful attention of men. And when you have 
made it mean all this—nay, when you have even made it 
manifest that this is what you mean by it, and are bound to 
make it stand for, the question about reaching the masses will 
drop out of your programs; the masses will come as clouds and 
as doves to your windows. — Dr. Washington Gladden. 


VI. 


SepeeeURISTIAN REVIVAL OF THE 
NATION. 


A sorts terrible and hopeful fact of the his- 
tory now being made is that the American peo- 
ple are under a national conviction of sin. God 
created and sent our nation to be an example 
and a witness of the power and wisdom of 
Christ unto the political salvation of the world. 
He appointed and anointed this nation to seek 
and fulfil the righteousness of his kingdom. 
We have failed. We have betrayed our trust, 
and forsaken our mission. God is disappointed 
in this nation. We are a fallen nation, an 
apostate people. We have done those material 
and political things we ought not to have done, 
and left undone the social and righteous things 
we ought to have done. We have wasted our 
substance in riotous national living, and have 

179 


180 THE CHRISTIAN STATE 


been faithless to the freedom which our fathers 
received as the gift of God. We have used the 
liberty wherewith their sacrifice made us free 
to rob and oppress one another. We have 
forged bonds of iniquity that will have to be 
broken by the divine passions of our sons. We 
have committed sins that will have to be re- 
mitted in the offered lives of those who love 
this nation, and will give themselves for its 
redemption. We need and will have the atone- 
ment of such a sacrifice. The hurt of this peo- 
ple cannot be lightly treated, or easily healed. 
The nation is sick at heart, and the body polli- 
tic full of disease and corruption. Except our 
nation repent, turning from political sin to so- 
cial righteousness, it. cannot be saved, and will 
lose its divine place in the earth. Except the 
energy which has gone into the mad competi- 
tion and speculation for material wealth, into 
the building of rival churches, be changed into 
a search for the justice of the kingdom of God, 
the material things we have gained will be 
taken from us, and there will not be left one 


stone upon another of our great temples of 


CHRISTIAN REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 181 


religion. Religious and economic statistics 
are no answer to this call to national repent- 
ance, and we cannot escape the call by chant- 
ing the holy watchwords of the fathers of our 
nation. Out of the movements and forces we | 
despise, God is able and likely to raise up true 
children unto our fathers. Except this nation 
be born again, and waken from that blind 
fatalism, which is the optimism of apostates 
and hypocrites, to a regenerating national con- 
sciousness of God, it cannot receive the salva- 
tion and the glory of the Christian state. 

We can none of us blame others than our- 
selves for our national fall from the grace and 
strength into which our nation was born. We 
are idle to place the guilt of our political sin 
and social shame on some other political party, 
some other sect of religion, than our own. In 
one way and another, we are all social sinners, 
and all in need of political redemption. We 
are none of us socially righteous, no, not one; 
nor have any of us been true to our nation, or 
been political witnesses of Christ to the people. 
We are all caught in the toils of the false so- 


182 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


cial doctrines that are converting the liberty 
of our fathers into our own social depotism 
and slavery, and making us the destroyers of 
our brothers. We can none of us individually 
extricate ourselves from the social pain and 
shame, or escape the political guilt. Upon us 
all rests the iniquity of the system of organized 
social wrong. We should first of all be blam- 
ing ourselves for the nation’s moral disgrace, 
and give ourselves to prayer and holy living, to 
sacrifice and work, on Christ’s behalf, for our 
nation’s redemption. We should seek and find 
wherein our own party, our own church, the 
practice of our own political or religious creed, 
has brought the nation’s social woe and per- 
plexity, and turn, the forces of our relations 
and influence toward the social regeneration 
that is to be the new birth of the nation. 

As the peril and strain of our national social 
situation increase, I am more clearly seeing 
that it is God himself who must save civiliza- 
tion and our nation. Except the Lord build 
the new social structure, we labor in vain to 


build it. Nothing else than a great political 


CHRISTIAN REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 183 


revival of the religion of Christ, a profound 
recuperation of the church which bears his 
name, can solve the American problem of so- 
ciety. By nothing but prayer and fasting, is- 
suing in repentance and the honest purpose to 
put the teachings of Christ into political, insti- 
tutional, and industrial practice, will the social 
demons be cast out. I see no other hope for 
our nation, no other redemption for society, 
than a religious revival such as the world has 
never known, that shall enthrone Christ in our 
national ideals, and give men the common will 
and the power to put the Christ life into social 
practice. A larger knowledge of the revelation 
of God in Christ, a new vision of Christ in 
the world, must prepare the way for saving 
society through a regenerated national life. 
None of us can satisfy the social questioning 
that is everywhere rising; nor can anything we 
might offer of our own, cause the social hope 
that is able to save. Our national salvation 
will not come from our own baffled thought, or 
be the gain of our confused and ignorant efforts, 


but will come as the gift of God, who shall or- 


184 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


dain peace for us when his Spirit shall have 
wrought in us his salvation in social justice. 
God will himself accomplish our social warfare, 
and purge our political iniquity, that he may 
speak comfortably at last to our redeemed and 
transformed institutions, empowered with the 
spirit and clothed with the authority of his 
Christ. 

The faith that God through Christ will save 
society will not paralyze our reform activities, 
nor weaken our sense of social responsibility, 
nor shake our readiness to be offered in behalf 
of our brothers, but will divinely energize us to 
the most strenuous activity, and inspire us to 
the holiest sacrifice. Our faith that God him- 
self will purge our political iniquity and effect 
our social salvation will, and nothing else can, 
make wise and mighty our social reforms, and 
change the vision of the kingdom of heaven on 
earth into fact. Civilization is founded upon 
what people believe concerning God and human 
life, and is built by what people feel. Social 
progress is but the deepening inbreathing of 


God, renewing the common life. Every new 


CHRISTIAN REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 185 


development of society has been but the mani- 
festation of a purified religious faith and in- 
creased religious feeling. Really, our social 
conflict, like all the conflicts gone, is a holy 
war between those who believe in God, and 
those who do not; between those who have 
faith in the right, and those who put their trust 
in the wrong; between those who believe in 
the law and power of sacrifice, and those who 
believe in the power and law of selfishness. 
The revival of the faith of those who have be- 
lieved in the right that God has revealed in 
Christ is the national salvation for which we 
wait. 

A truly scientific interpretation of history 
will give a place not yet given to the great 
religious revivals, and discern in them the 
formative influence of progress. Every wide 
revival has issued in social and political re- 
construction. John Richard Green, in his 
“History of the English People,” is the only 
historian who defines the work of religious 
movements in the political and social develop- 


ment of England. His report of the revival 


186 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


of the twelfth century is suggestive to this 
time of industrial anarchy through plutocratic 
misrule. It was then, ‘at the close of Henry’s 
reign, and throughout the reign of Stephen, 
England was stirred by the first of those great 
religious movements which it was to experience 
afterward in the preaching of the friars, the 
Lollardism of Wycliffe, the Reformation, the 
Puritan enthusiasm, and the mission-work of 
the Wesleys. Everywhere in town and coun- 
try men banded themselves together for prayer ; 
hermits flocked to the woods ; noble and churl 
welcomed the austere Cistercians — a reformed 
offshoot of the Benedictine order—as they 
spread over the moors and forests of the 
north. A new spirit of devotion woke the 
slumbers of the religious houses, and pene- 
trated alike to the home of the noble and 
the trader.” The revival grew into a power 
“strong enough to wrest England out of the 


b] 


chaos of feudal misrule” after a long period 
of “feudal anarchy.” The power and influ- 
ence of the revivals of Edwards, the Wesleys, 


and Finney in the political development of 


Stet tAW REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 187 


America have never been taken into account 
by our historians and political students. The 
emphasis laid upon the religious foundation 
of civilization is the chief value of Mr. Kidd’s 
widely discussed book on “ Social Evolution.” 
The philosophy of Mr.’ Kidd’s book I cannot 
for a moment accept. His conclusion is the 
distinct contradiction of his premise. His no- 
tion of religion as extra-rational and only su- 
pernatural I believe fatal to both faith and 
reason. The ignorance of some of his as- 
sumptions seems to me inexcusable, and his 
dogmatisms intolerable. Yet he has done 
good service in scientifically defining civiliza- 
tion as a religious development, and in calling 
our attention to the historical relation to that 
development of the purely intellectual forces. 
He clearly shows that “the process at work in 
society is evolving religious character as a first 
product, and intellectual capacity only so far 
as it can be associated with this quality. In 
other words, the most distinctive feature of 
human evolution as a whole is, that through 


the operation of the law of natural selection 


188 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


the race must grow ever more and more reli- 
gious.” “The intellect has, accordingly, always 
mistaken the nature of religious forces, and 
regarded as beneath notice, movements which 
have had within them the power to control 
the course of human development for hun- 
dreds and even thousands of years.” Noting 
the opposition of the educated classes in Eng- 
land to progress, he says: “This is to be no- 
ticed alike of measures which have extended 
education, which have emancipated trade, which 
have extended the franchise. The educated 
classes have even, it must be confessed, op- 
posed measures which have tended to secure 
religious freedom and to abolish slavery. The 
motive force behind the long list of progres- 
sive measures carried during this period has 
in scarcely any appreciable measure come from 
the educated classes; it has come almost ex- 
clusively from the middle and lower classes, 
who have in turn acted, not under the stimu- 
lus of intellectual motives, but under the in- 
fluence of their altruistic feelings.” If we are 


to distinguish between the spiritual and the 


CHRISTIAN REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 189 


intellectual man, which distinction is at best 
but an accommodation to our failure to appre- 
hend the true nature of education, then the 
intellectual man is always a lower order of 
being than the spiritual man, just as the dis- 
tinctively physical man is of a lower order 
than the intellectual. So I am only scien- 
tific when I look to the increased apprehen- 
sion of spiritual forces, to the revival of faith 
and quickening of the religious feeling, for 
the remaking of society. And I speak with 
the historic spirit, in strict accord with the 
actual facts, when I say that society is to be 
saved through a great revival of the religion 
of Jesus Christ, who is to-day the social ideal 
of the world. Through yielding to the _per- 
sonal touch and power of the life forces in 
Christ, will the forces of our civilization be 
regenerated and harmonized. 

But the Christian revival our nation needs 
is not only coming, it is come; and we are 
being borne by its deep movement toward the 
mark of a higher national destiny in Christ 
Jesus. Unto all those who love his appear- 


I9O THE CHRISTIAN SHALE: 


ing, Christ is here, judging and reviving the 
nation. Our social conviction of sin, the heavi- 
ness of the divine hand on the national con- — 
science, is the sign that the Christ is in the 
midst of our nation, and his judgments are 
our hope of redemption in righteousness. The 
manifest evidence of the reviving presence of 
Christ is the fact that men and institutions are 
being practically judged by his teachings. We 
are thus a saved nation, and not lost, though 
fallen we be; for God who is reviving us 
-through his Christ will bring forth our nation 
anew. 

The Christian revival of our nation is, and 
will more fully prove to be, distinctly social in 
its nature, though in being social it will also 
become political, and will deeply change the 
life and prospect of the church. It will have 
so little of the old individualistic ground of ap- 
peal and growth, that the church will probably 
be overwhelmed by its power ere professional 
Christianity discerns the revival’s presence. 
Men will repent, as they repented at the call of 
Jesus and his prophet, because a new order of 


CHRISTIAN REVIVAL OF THE NATION. I9QI 


things is at hand, appealing to all their poten- 
tial moral greatness, and giving them power to 
sacrifice themselves that the new order may be 
fulfilled. Not Thomas a Kempis and the indi- 
vidualism of Puritan religious teachers, nor the 
unmoral methods and appeals of modern evan- 
gelism, greatly as God has honored and used 
all these, but Jesus and Paul better read will 
supply the thought and appeal of the coming 
evangelism of the kingdom of God. The unity 
of life is both the morally terrible and funda- 
mentally hopeful fact with which the larger 
revival will reckon in its pursuit of the salva- 
tion of men. 

No mere individualism, religious or political, 
can save the world. The individual religious 
development will necessarily be arrested hence- 
forth until we have a religious social develop- 
ment. The conversion of the individual to 
Christ is a phrase now emptied of much of its 
real meaning until the social ideal of Christ 
shall be conceived in the heart of society. As- 
sociated men, though they may be individually 


converted to a faith in Christ, yet now econ- 


192 LHE CHRISTIAN Sia 


omically act, and are socially related to each 
other, under the dominion of principles and 
customs that are largely a contradiction of all. 
that Jesus taught and practised. There must 
be given to men, and society must accept, a 
wholly new order of human relations before 
even the individual may fully see the kingdom 
of God. The kingdom of God is not in individ- 
uals, save as they are in right relations with 
each other. The individual can become wholly 
perfect only through the perfection of his rela- 
tions. There is no perfect deliverance of the 
individual from relations with the sin of the 
world without the social realization of Chris- 
tianity. 

The social oneness of human life does not 
subtract, as some are constantly asserting, 
from the personal responsibility of the indi- 
vidual, but infinitely adds thereto. If men are 
made to understand that each one is not only 
responsible for his own life, or for the life of 
such neighbors as he may select, but for all 
human life as well; that sin is nothing more nor 


less than various gross or refined forms and 


CARISTIAN REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 193 


degrees of living for one’s self instead of for 
others ; and that the only individual salvation is 
in following Christ in bearing away the sin of 
the world —we have surely brought to bear upon 
them an appeal that makes insignificant and of 
doubtful moral quality any mere individualistic 
appeal. The social motive for repentance, in- 
stead of subtracting from personal responsibility, 
invests the individual with the very responsi- 
bility of God. It is the evangelism that makes 
the kingdom of God—the divine harmony 
and happiness of human kind—not a mere 
individual escape, the motive for repentance. 
The repentance this evangelism will procure is 
that of an awakening to the wrong, ruin, and 
sorrow which the individual sinner inflicts upon 
his fellows without regard to his good or evil 
intentions, making his life a moral cancer in 
the body of humanity, a frightful moral disor- 
der in the social organism. It will be a repent- 
ance also born of the terrible consciousness of 
the difficulties which the individual sinner puts 
in the way of God himself. For there is a 
sense in which human sin cripples God; your 


194 THE CHRISTIAN Sian 


sin and mine compromise God, embarrass his 
Spirit, frustrate and delay his plans, pierce his 
Father-heart with a pain that we cannot in the 
least understand except through well and pen- 
itently considering the cross. Thus not only 
one’s neighbor, his nation, his world, but God 
and his whole universe, are involved in the sin 
of the individual, and grounded in the divine 
and ultimate motive for individual repentance. 
It surely seems a strange want of faith in God 
and the power of his Spirit, a strangely selfish 
regard for one’s cherished religious doctrines, 
to impugn the worth and force of the social 
motive for repentance. | 

No man who is truly converted to Christ’s 
way of life, who is reconciled to making God’s 
moral nature his own, and has thus experienced 
that reconciliation and propitiation with God’s 
will and way which the cross is meant to pro- 
cure, will want to extricate himself from the 
common social woe; he ought not, he dare not. 
We are all members one of another, limited by 
each other’s limitations, rightly bearing the 


imputation of each other’s guilt, all expiators 


CHRISTIAN. REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 195 


of a common inheritance of sin from the past. 
The individual could not extricate himself from 
the social guilt, if individual extrication were 
possible, without condemning himself to a 
worse guilt. There is a divine complicity in 
the common evil, a redemptive participation 
in the social wrong, which is the very essence 
of Christian living. It is infinitely better and 
Christlier to fail in a sense, to be less good, 
if you please, in sharing the social guilt and 
woe, than to spiritually succeed apart. One had 
better not be a saint, and accept the limitations 
of the common social trials, engaging in work 
that is entangled with the social wrong, raising 
a family amidst the social change and seeming 
chance, bearing the burden and heartache of 
the social failure, enduring the pain of the so- 
cial strife and evolution, than to be a saint and 
live apart from these. The regenerated individ- 
ual must bear, and ought to bear, the humiliation 
and perplexity, the social guilt and retribution, 
of the sins of the system in which he lives; he 
cannot and ought not escape being a bearer of 
the social sin and shame; his food and cloth- 


196 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


ing, his money and his bread, the home in 
which he lives and the books he reads, the 
school in which he learns and the pulpit under 
which he worships, are all stained with the 
blood of the social victims ; it must be so with 
him, for it was so with Christ ; in no other way 
than by being made sin for society, by volun- 
tarily enduring the social agony and expiation, 
can he prepare society to become the organized 
righteousness of God. He that is least in the 
kingdom of social life and experience, he that 
-is weakest in the toils of the social salvation, is 
greater than he that is saintliest in the king- 
dom of individualistic prayer and religious self- 
concern. 

The first work of Jesus was the bringing 
into the world of a new social spirit, the telling 
and interpreting of a new order of life, which 
spirit and order men might individually accept 
or reject, but which yet placed them in a wholly 
new attitude toward God and the world. The 
kingdom of God was preached first, the so- 
cial regeneration first begun, the new spirit 
and order of association first made known and 


CHRISTIAN REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 197 


brought to bear upon men, and the relation 
of the individual to the new spirit and regen- 
erated order proclaimed afterward. And this 
is the divine method always. Cardinal New- 
man has said: “If there be a distinction of the 
gospel plainly laid down in Scripture, it is that 
it is a social religion, and addresses individuals 
as parts of a whole.” I cannot find that Jesus 
ever dealt with a soul as sustaining simply 
an individual relation to God. His apparently 
most individualistic sayings, when taken knowl- 
edge of with their context and associations, 
never treat any man apart from his relations 
to other men, apart from the social organism, 
Christ’s process of salvation is the spiritual 
communizing of men, bringing them out of 
selfish and discordant into just and harmonious 
relations, changing them from purely individual 
into loving and social beings. The redemption 
of the world is the divine socialization of the 
race. 

The Christian revival of our nation does not 
need to wait for what the churches have under- 
stood by the conversion of the individual before 


198 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


the present social order be born into a new and 
diviner quality of human relations. The social 
salvation of our nation through Christ will by 
no means wait for the conversion of each indi- 
vidual, or the conscious conversion of a ma- 
jority of individuals, to the divinely coming 
social order. We do not need to wait until 
each member of society is converted to Christ’s 
philosophy of life in order to translate his 
teachings into social organization. The prin- 
ciples of the Sermon on the Mount may or- 
ganize the economic relations of men long 
before every individual is converted to these 
principles. The divine government of the 
world which Jesus disclosed may be translated 
into our national ideals, incorporated in the 
public life of the nation and made the spirit of 
its laws, generations before its legislators con- 
sciously accept this divine government. As 
Christendom became an organized reality, in 
some degree permeated and ruled by the Christ 
life, a divine advance beyond the spirit of 
Roman imperialism, long before the nations 


had any Christian conception of law and gov- 


CHRISTIAN REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 199 


ernment, so the state can become Christian in 
the ideals and patterns of its organization, 
likewise the industrial and social order within 
its borders, long before all citizens, or even a 
majority of citizens, are consciously converted 
to the Christ life. I do not expect the individ- 
ual to be relieved of his responsibility through 
environment, but expect the accomplishment 
of such organizations of the righteousness of 
the kingdom of God, as will infinitely increase 
both the opportunity and responsibility of the 
individual. With the kingdom of heaven mani- 
festly at hand in the spirit and pattern of our 
social organizations and political institutions, 
God has wide open channels, now closed, through 
which the mighty spiritual forces at his com- 
mand may press upon the individual. Though 
we are seldom honest enough to confess it, we 
all perfectly well know that the vast majority 
of individuals have and can have no reasonable 
opportunity for conversion to the Christ life, 
-or development therein, in the existing order 
of society. 

A function of the Christian revival of our 


200 ; THE CHRISTIAN: STAGES 


nation, though it will not be fulfilled until other 
and more immediate functions have been real-. 
ized, is the social organization of education. 
Upon the nature of the common education 
does the foundation and perpetuity of the 
nation depend. And we are not an educated 
nation. We are committing a great national 
blunder in supposing that our public schools 
and the spread of popular information are 
educating the people. The fundamental prin- 
ciple of education is the discovery and appre- 
hension of right. The peril of our people is — 
in the want of a righteous will; in the lack of 
ethical sense; in the individualistic nature and 
social infidelity of education. We are just 
emerging from an excited and exhausted age — 
a wild, speculative, covetous age without moral 
reason, without a will to seek and achieve 
right. “Freedom without will,” says Hegel, 
‘is an empty word.” The want of a righteous 
social will has been largely due to the extreme 
individualism and moral imbecility of our edu- 
cation, appealing to the most selfish and dwarf- 


ing motives for intellectual success. Even 


CHRISTIAN REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 201 


theological institutions depend on competitive 
methods and prizes to procure the closest dili- 
gence on the part of those commissioned by 
their Lord to disciple the nations in the unt- 
versal law of sacrifice. 

The education of life does not consist in the 
number of things one knows, but in the dis- 
covery and appropriation of the forces which 
unfold and empower life. It is not the spread 
of information we really need so much, or that 
is doing us much good —the popularization of 
the Greek play, of books about the old masters, 
or even of political economy; we need instruc- 
tion in justice and right—their popularization 
and history. We do not know how to appro- 
priate what is in literature, in science, in his- 
tory, until we know how to translate them into 
terms of right and wrong, how to make them 
the channels through which the forces of life 
are received, to be wrought into character and 
given to the world in power and _ sacrifice. 
One man may spend years with Homer, and 
have a perfect knowledge of the entire text, 


yet in no sense be Homerically educated; an- 


202 THE CHRISTIAN Sigs 


other may read a few lines of Homer, compre- 
hending their life sources and appropriating 
their life forces, and receive a measure of uni- 
versal and eternal education. 

Education is a spiritual and moral process, 
and can only be truly organized with a view to 
moral development in the highest quality of 
right known tothe nation. Christ’s revelation 
of the relation of the spiritual and moral to 
the intellectual development is clearly different 
from our present apprehension. The intellect 
of Jesus was enlightened, his ideas conceived, 
his thought formed, through the operation on 
his life of spiritual forces; through moral pas- 
sions and pursuits. He was unlettered while 
the teachers of his day were extraordinarily 
lettered men; yet he was educated and they 
were uneducated; he had knowledge while 
they had ignorance. He was taught, as he in- 
sisted that all men should be taught, imme- 
diately by the Spirit of God —that is, through 
the moral processes involved in making right- 
eousness the end of his learning. There was a 


large sense in which Jesus lived continually in 


Pees ttANW REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 203 


the moment, free from all need of being con- 
sistent or logical, according to our systems and 
logics. There was a complete absence from 
his development of the mechanical, the arbi- 
trary, the perplexing, even the ethical; his was 
a wholly personal, spiritual, and moral develop- 
ment. He never presented his own teachings 
in any systematic form; he developed no sys- 
tem of truth, or ethics, or principles, though 
he presented a complete philosophy of life. 
Withal, history knows of no life that unfolded 
so methodically, that was so perfectly educated, 
as the life of the Son of man. The method 
of the education of Jesus was, however, the 
method of the development of Peter, John, and 
Paul, the three characters among the apostles 
possessing the greatest spiritual, personal, and 
intellectual forces ; they were educated directly 
of God, through the operation on their minds 
of the Spirit of life that was in Christ — that is, 
through pursuing and organizing all knowledge 
as a means to righteousness. This divine 
method of education has been tested but inci- 


dentally and meagrely in the history of edu- 


204 LHE CHRISTIAN SLADLa 


cation—even the education under the control 
of the church. Much of our present element- 
ary education is a sadly ignorant trifling with 
young life; and our higher education, when 
not a mere intellectual dilettanteism, is largely 
what might be called an intellectual sensuality, 
more ruinous to the life than the lust of gain 
or the lust of the body. In our learning how 
to apprehend and use the educational method 
of Jesus, in the development of his own life 
and the lives he taught, lie the redemption of 
-education and a Christian development of the 
intellect. 

The education of a man is never merely or 
mainly an individual matter, but a matter of 
universal concern; it is the socializing, the unt- 
versalizing, of the man’s life. The education 
of a man consists in the fulfilment of his life 
as a mission among men; as a divine errand 
in the world. True education is the bringing 
of a man into right relations with his fellows 
and with God. It is the realization of one’s 
manhood, the development of a man in his 


entirety. The word holiness, if rightly com- 


CHRISTIAN REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 205 


prehended, would express the end of education. 
To educate one is to make him whole, to put 
him in the way of realizing his manhood in its 
social entirety. A process by which a man is 
made whole, by which his life is fulfilled in 
association, is the school for the accumulation 
and discipline of knowledge. But the process 
is not the wholeness, any more than the sun 
that pulls the oak out of the acorn is the tree. 
A man is being educated only by that which 
is calling all the powers of his whole life into 
sacrifice and service. The realization of both 
a Christian education and a true democracy 
will proceed with the making of whole men 
and women. 

The whole man is a political being. He 
who is not in the best sense a politician is 
something less than a man, and fails to fulfil 
his life. He who withdraws from the politics 
of the nation for the sake of private interests, 
that he may devote himself to material gain 
or intellectual study, has morally betrayed his 
nation. He who is not educated in political 
right, and participates not in the politics of 


206 THE CHRISTIAN STAT 


his people, is politically atheistic; he refuses 
national and sacrificial fellowship with the life 
of God. For God lives in the politics of the 
people; in the midst of the nation he dwells; 
he has always been seeking to fulfil his right 
in the being of the nation. The state is bound 
to educate men in political right; for the 
common wealth depends upon the common 
moral health of the political people. The edu- 
cation that will increase and fulfil the Christian 
revival of the nation, and prepare the way of 
the Christian state, is the development of a 
common political Christ mind in the people ; 
the development of the will and power of the 
people to love each other economically, socially, 
industrially, and politically, and associate them- 
selves in nationally organized sacrifice for ful- 
filling the kingdom of God in the world. | 

An immediate function of our national re- 
vival of Christianity is to unify the various 
reforms, political, social, and religious, that 
are now working independently, and largely 
at cross purposes. A fatality of the Reforma- 


tion, which we must sacrifice and pray to avert 


CHRISTIAN REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 207 


in the great changes we are in the midst of, 
was the breaking-up of the reforming forces 
into hostile camps, each camp becoming intent 
upon the definition and defence of its own pe- 
culiar doctrines, and the Reformation was in a 
large sense a failure. For if there were nothing 
beyond Protestantism for the church, the church 
would be lost indeed, and Christianity a reced- 
ing force. But it ought not to be among us as 
it was among the Reformers, with the lessons 
of the Reformation so plainly manifest in a 
divided and weakened church. Nor will it be 
so, if all of us who hope for the redemption of 
our nation, who wait and work for the regener- 
ation of society, are Christly enough to make 
the sacrifice of methods and opinions that the 
urgency of our divine opportunity demands, 
and unite upon a few fundamental principles, 
that we may go before the people with a na- 
tional social program of Christ. After the 
revival power that is rising through the nation 
has possessed us, we shall have power to unite 
our social effort, and become as one witness of 


the Christ whose appearing is now widely man- 


208 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


ifest. Doubtless the main service of our social 
efforts and reforms thus far has been the prep- 
aration of the political way of the Lord Christ. 
As I say this, I seem to hear again certain pas- 
sages in Beethoven’s only opera, “ Fidelio ;”’ 
as the power of these passages increases in 
their progress, you can see the great sorrowful 
composer reaching out into the realms of music 
to gather and accord the sounds which he 
pours forth in majestic harmonies, that make 
you hear God singing a hymn of faith concern- 
ing the world, while he pauses for a moment of 
rest in his travail for man. So our now unre- 
lated and conflicting social efforts will be gath- 
ered by the Christ, now appearing in their 
midst, into one great harmonious movement 
toward the realization of the kingdom of God 
in our national life and institutions. 

Another function of the revival will be the 
preparation of a new spirit in the accomplish- 
ment of great changes. Between the wrath of 
the Lamb and the wrath of even the noblest 
Puritan spirit there is a profound difference. 
The hand of the most righteous iconoclast and 


CHRISTIAN REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 209 


the hand that wielded the whip of small cords 
were not moved by the same spirit. It is not 
enough to be mastered by a strong passion for 
righteousness, and overcome with an indigna- 
tion at wrong; only they who have been bap- 
tized with the holiest and most sacrificial love 
for men, whose experience has taught them 
that mercy as well as judgment is law, whose 
hearts are broken with the pain of the wrong 
,as if the wrong were all their own, are fitted to 
denounce the wrong and declare the right. It 
is not enough to know the truth, and our re- 
sponsibility ends not with speaking the truth ; 
we dare not dismiss the uncomprehending and 
resentful with the thought that our duty is done 
when our message is spoken, and that their set- 
tlement is now only with God; he is not pre- 
pared to be an apostle of truth who has not felt 
the hurt and horror of falsehood as if he were 
its cause, and responsible for the world’s ex- 
trication from its ruin and power; none are 
divinely ready to bear witness to the truth save 
such as can enter sympathetically into the feel- 


ings of even the Pharisee or the Sadducee, and 


210 LTHE CHRISTIAN SIAGE. 


bear all reviling without  self-consciousness, 
with shame and persecution, in the hope of so 
lovingly manifesting the truth as to win men 
to its service. They who would set the world 
right must know the fellowship of the divine 
expiation of the world’s wrong; they must 
know how to vicariously appropriate to their 
own souls the humiliation and retribution of 
wrong, its sorrows and its agony, and with 
these the hope of repentance and the power of 
forgiving love. By those who are “ready to 
live the life of the Crucified” will the Chris- 
tian revival of the nation be apprehended and 
wrought into regenerated social organizations 
and political institutions. 

Our nation is saved; for the Christ of God 
is manifestly reviving us in the midst of our 
political corruptions, religious apostasies, and 
social disorder. But out of what travail and 
sorrow the Christian birth of our nation may 
come no man can tell. We live in the early 
consummation of a system, a materialistic de- 
velopment of civilization, that is as truly ex- 
hausted of its vital forces and decadent, and 


Pato ttAN REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 211 


relatively as confident and revengeful, as the 
Roman system into which Jesus came. So in 
the midst of the awful days that draw near, in 
the tribulation of the social change, there must 
grow up a new Christian fellowship, which will 
draw no visible lines of separation and form no 
new institutions, but which will yet be as dis- 
tinct in spirit from the professional religion of 
the church and the politics of our parties as 
the early Christian communities were distinct 
from the religion of Judaism and the politics 
of Rome. And these political disciples of 
Christ, these social witnesses of his, must be 
as truly prepared to be sacrificed for their Lord 
as were his primitive disciples. The service 
of witnessing for Christ, though holy with the 
blessedness and strength of the purest and 
fullest inspiration, is a service that costs far 
beyond the modern religious estimate, and 
should be entered upon only by those who love 
not their life unto the death, and have been 
baptized in the blood of the Lamb. A thou- 
sand may do needed and noble work amidst the 
praise of men, who will rise in wrath against 


212 THE CHRISTIAN STALE: 


one who speaks the truth pertinent to his time. 
The teachings of Christ are yet so new to our 
apprehension that they will seem destructive © 
to faith and civilization when seriously applied 
to existing organizations and economies. The 
witnessing of a good confession of political 
faith in Christ, though gladly heard by the 
people, will not be patiently endured by many 
leaders of official religion and politics. They 
who have undertaken to deliver the word of 
such a testimony have already been denounced 
as destroyers of faith and order by both politi- 
cal and religious authorities. By a fellowship 
of men able to deny themselves and bear the 
reproach of Christ, to throw away their reputa- 
tion and be disgraced before official religion 
and politics for his name’s sake, will the way 
be prepared for the political realization of the 
sacrifice of Christ in a state converted to be 
his minister to the collective peoples. 

But this apostolic fellowship will have both 
such a retrospect and prospect of joy as to 
make each life a song of hope to the world. 
They follow the prophets who through faith 


CHRISTIAN REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 213 


subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, ob- 
tained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, 
quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge 
of the sword, from weakness were made strong, 
waxed mighty in war, turned to flight armies 
of aliens. They walk the triumphant path of 
the primitive martyr founders of our faith, who 
were everywhere classed in the ancient world 
as atheists, and enemies of faith and morals. 
As they witness and work, they may helpfully 
call to mind the disgrace that not long ago at- 
tached to the abolitionism of fathers who are 
now anxious and angry because of the social 
hopes of their sons. Above all other sources 
of solace and courage, there is the presence 
and fellowship of him whose words and sacri- 
fice bid the faithful be of good cheer, in the 
knowledge that this is a saved and not a lost 
world. And better than all solace and courage, 
stronger than all spiritual comfort and mortal 
faith, is the love of the Father who hath 
brought you and me into this wondrous pres- 
ent redemptive time of the social immanence 
and political manifestation of his Christ. For 


214 LHE CHRISTIAN SIAL, 


the loss of all things can be as nothing when 
weighed with the privilege of testifying to the 
presence of Christ as the social Deliverer, and 
to the associating power and organizing wis- 
dom of his law of love, unto our nation so 
deeply troubled with industrial disorganization, 
and with the reorganization of industrial forces 
in social hostility. And the misunderstanding 
of such a testimony, which a witness for Christ 
cannot for a moment consider for his own sake, 
but only as a revelation of the need of Christ 
in human life, and a call to the matchless joy 
of serving that need, will disappear with all the 
moral mists and clouds of our selfish minds in 
the light of the holier social day, when the 
Christ shall have manifested his appearing in 
a regenerated civilization. 

Will any of us follow him —are we ready to 
be offered? If we will, if we are, why are we 
so slow of faith, so doubtful in action? Why 
are not we, and all who would be of the fellow- 
ship between the two great seas, finding each 
other out, that we may move together in one 
holy fellowship of sacrifice, not in strife of 


CHRISTIAN REVIVAL OF THE NATION. 215 


words or deeds, but as true and faithful wit- 
nesses to the come King and his kingdom, 
apparently unorganized and yet more terrible to 
organized wrong than any army with banners? 
The appearing Christ, whose presence has been 
manifest to us in this hour, now bids us arise 
and go hence with him, praying for the faith 
that will not fail him and the fear that will not 
deny him, associating with us all who will hear 
and believe. And the hence to which he 
would have us go is the Calvary of the social 
redemption that shall enthrone him as the 
nation’s King, redeem the nation unto social 
holiness, and set the people free. Shall we 
arise and go hence with him — to the cross — 
then into the glory of the national resurrection 
—the regenerate civilization—the holy city 


come down out of heaven from God? 


216 THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 


‘* Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where ts the dis- 
puter of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of 
the world? ‘For seeing that in the wisdom of God, the world 
through tts wisdom knew not God, it was God’s good pleasure 
through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that be- 
lieve. Seeing that Fews ask for signs, and Greeks seck after 
wisdom. but we preach Christ crucified, unto Fews a stum- 
blingblock, and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that 
are called, both Fews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and 
the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God ts wiser 
than men, and the weakness of God ts stronger than men. 

‘*For ye behold your calling, brethren, how that not many 
wise after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are 
called: but God chose the foolish things of the world, that he 
might put to shame them that are wise; and God chose the weak 
things of the world, that he might put to shame the things that 
are strong; and the base things of the world, and the things that 
are despised, did God choose, yea, and the things that are not, 
that he might bring to nought the things that are: that no flesh 
should glory before God. But of him are ye tn Christ Fesus, 
who was made unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness, 
and sanctification, and redemption ; that, according as tt ts 
written, [He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord,”’ 


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